





Library of The Theological Seminary 


PRINCETON ° NEW JERSEY 


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PRESENTED BY 


John Stuart Conning, D.D. 


Beis84).75 £48, 1925 

Levinger, Lee J. 1890-1966. | 

Anti-Semitism in the United) 
States 


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ANTI-SEMITISM INSCHE 3.7 
UNITED STATES 


ITS HISTORY AND CAUSES 


BY 


RABBI LEE J. LEVINGER, Pu.D. 


Author of ‘‘A Jewish Chaplain In France’? 





NEW YORK | 
BLOCH PUBLISHING CO., Inc. 


“THE JEWISH BOOK CONCERN’ 


1925 


COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY 
LEE J. LEVINGER 


Printed in the United States 


TO MY PARENTS 


WHO FIRST TAUGHT ME THE MEANING OF TOLERANCE 


And all must love the human form, 
In heathen, Turk, or Jew; 

Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, 
There God is dwelling too. 


WILLIAM BLAKE. 


PREFACE 


This study, which was submitted as one of the requirements 
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of 
Pennsylvania, has meant the assembling of personal and 
theoretical interests of various types. It has two chapters of 
pure theory on which the practical application is based. To the 
student of social philosophy or sociology, then, chapters 1 and 2 
will contain the essentials of the study. The general reader, not 
interested in the technical basis but in the conclusions, may 
prefer to omit these chapters from the reading, and to proceed 
from the introduction directly to the applications of this theory 
in American history and specifically to the problem of the Jew 
in America, as developed in chapters 8 to 9. 


Grateful acknowledgments are due to Professor Edgar <A. 
Singer, Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Julius 
Drachsler of the College of the City of New York, and Mr. 
Leon L. Lewis, Secretary of the Anti-Defamation League, for 
their very stimulating aid, both prior to and during the writing 
of this study, and to my wife for her assistance in the preparation 
of the manuscript. | 


Lee J. LEVINGER 


Wilmington, Delaware, May, 1925, 


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CHAPTER 


it 


VII. 


VIII. 


IX. 


CONTENTS 


Introduction: A STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM.... 


THE ‘‘Group MIND,’’ A DEFINITION AND A 
DESCRIPTION 


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AMERICAN History, A DEVELOPMENT OF GROUPS... 
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INTRODUCTION 


A STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM 


The existence of an anti-Semitic movement in the United 
States of America since the World War is a paradox that 
attracts attention at once. The most ancient and most pervasive 
form of intolerance is now at home in a nation founded by 
revolution and dedicated to the principles of freedom and toler- 
ance. How can such a movement exist in such a nation? The 
apparent contradiction leads us at once into the many contradic- 
tions of the psychology of large groups of human beings, which 
both parallels and contradicts the simpler psychology of their 
constituent individuals. This is a leading question, to answer 
which we must go as deeply as we can into the mind of the 
group, into the relation of groups to the smaller groups of which 
they are composed and of those smaller groups to each other, 
into the genesis and implications of tolerance and intolerance. 

This theoretical study completed, we shall then have to verify 
the principles there worked out by application to the difficult 
and crucial problem of the present study. If a theory of group 
and sub-group can explain the existence and the development of 
anti-Semitism in America, it will have solved a problem of 
exceptional complexity and significance, one central to the whole 
field. This will involve a study of the mind of the American 
people, in brief outline, with its various movements of intoler- 
ance in their bearing on the present one. It will also necessitate 
a slight study of the various anti-Semitic examples, historic and 
contemporary, from which the American movement derives in 
part. It will conclude with a consideration of the future of the 
American people as a united group, taking into view the 
tendencies of the sub-groups within the bounds of their common 
nation, or over-group. 

Anti-Semitism is the modern form of the ancient prejudice 
against the Jew; it began in Germany in 1871, directly after the 
Franco-Prussian War, and bases its opposition to the Jews on 

9 


10 Anti-Semitism im the United States 


the race theory. Anti-Judaism is, of course, much older, as 
old as the people against whom it was directed. In most ancient 
times, as represented by the Egyptian taskmasters and the: 
Haman of the Book of Esther, it was like any other national 
hatred or prejudice. Later it took on a distinctly religious 
coloring, so that we find a Philo going to Rome to appeal for the 
Jewish colony in Alexandria or a Josephus writing a defense 
of his people against Apion. With the growth of Christianity 
into a persecuting body, anti-Judaism became strictly a religious 
matter, based on the New Testament story that the Jews were 
responsible for the death of Jesus. Medieval laws on the Jews 
were, then, often based on the principle of expiation, such as the 
yellow badge which distinguished the wearer when he left the 
compulsory shelter of the Ghetto. <A different form of religious 
motivation was shown in the frequent accusations of desecrating 
the Host or of using the blood of a Christian child in preparing 
the unleavened bread of Passover, which appears in the Canter- 
bury Tales and was revived as recently as 1911 in the notorious 
Beilis case at Kiev, Russia. Along with this went occasional 
mob outbreaks such as occur against the negroes in our Southern 
states, and still more rarely decrees of expulsion, which drove 
the entire Jewish population from England in 1294, from Spain 
in 1492, and from other countries at other tintes, for a longer 
or shorter period. 

The actual applications of this religious anti-Judaism were 
far too many to enumerate here, ranging from the prohibition of 
tilling the soil to compulsory attendance at a Christian sermon, 
as in Browning’s “‘Holy Cross Day.’’ Counteracting it were 
the frequent intercourse and occasional intermarriage through 
the Middle Ages, the paid protection of the Holy Roman 
Emperor for his Kammerknechte, the toleration of the Moors 
and later of Holland, finally the emancipation of the French 
Revolution on abstract grounds of the Rights of Man. Religious 
discrimination was forbidden in the American Constitution, so 
that anti-Judaism of the religious type had no footing in the 
new nation, strong as it had previously been in several of the 
colonies. In addition, the number of Jews in America was very 
small, so that discrimination against them might exist in prin- 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 11 


ciple but could have little exercise in practise. And those few 
were often wealthy and cultured descendants of the old Spanish 
Jewry. During the most of the nineteenth century the Jews 
entering the country met the same difficulties as other immi- 
erants, with very little variation. 

But then the problem changed; the number of Jews increased 
from 3,000 in 1800 to 250,000 in 1880. Some of these achieved 
wealth and began to associate with non-Jewish social circles. 
The opposition to them now became largely social. They were 
excluded from many hotels and summer resorts, from clubs, 
college fraternities and the like. This phase of the problem was 
often acute but never important, and is here mentioned merely 
in passing, though it will have its bearing on the theory to be 
developed. In addition, the religious prejudice continued, 
similar to that between Christian denominations but stronger, 
owing to the frequent teaching of Jewish responsibility for the 
crucifixion. These two aspects of anti-Judaism persisted as the 
only ones in America until after the World War, and these 
were sporadic, and often opposed by the tendency of our political 
democracy and by various groups of religious liberals. 

Meanwhile, modern racialism had been born and with it 
modern anti-Semitism, the attack on the Jew as a member of a 
different race, inferior or at least unassimilable by the Aryan. 
Writers against the Jew no longer turned for their weapons to 
Eisenmenger’s ‘‘Endecktes Judentum’’ of 1701, with its relig- 
ious criticism and personal strictures. The new classics are 
Werner Sombart’s ‘‘Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben’’ and 
Drumont’s ‘‘La France Juive.’’ An elaborate scientific basis 
has been constructed, on which a movement of opposition was 
erected, apparently much the same as that of the Inquisition or 
of Apion. One of the conclusions of the present study will be 
that it is in fact the same, and that the racial theory .can be 
almost overlooked in estimating the actual causes and processes 
of anti-Semitism. It would be an interesting, though not essential 
task, to examine this racial thory in detail and determine how 
much scientific authenticity it may possess. In Russia the con- 
ditions of autocracy threatened by liberalism and war led to 
official anti-Semitism, with pogroms or massacres of. the Jews 


12 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


actually led by army officers. In Germany the officialism and 
social stratification led to discrimination against Jews in the 
appointment of judges, university professors and army officers. 
In France anti-Semitism became a part of royalism and clerical- 
ism, and from the military and royalist group came the Dreyfus 
ease. In England anti-Semitism was chiefly literary; Hillaire 
Belloc proves the Jews to be aliens who should all be sent to 
Palestine, while Gilbert K. Chesterton visits Palestine and re- 
ports that the Jews there are terrible creatures and ought to be 
excluded from the Holy Land! 

But all this time there was no anti-Semitism, as a literary, 
political or economic movement in the United States. That was 
a product of the period after the World War. There was merely 
religious prejudice of the orthodox and social ostracism of the 
elite among gentile society. The Jew had not even attracted the 
special attention of the various anti-alien movements in Ameri- 
ean history, owing to his small numbers and frequent rapid 
Americanization. It seemed as though anti-Semitism was a 
movement foreign to American life and institutions. Now, how- 
ever, the movement exists and may be considered briefly in four 
phases. 

1. The first to be considered is the attempt to limit the per- 
centage of Jews in American universities. The ‘‘numerus claus- 
us,’’ typical of Russia under the Czars, has been one of the 
favorite projects of the anti-Semitic parties in various European 
countries, working either through their representatives in the 
parliaments or through their sympathizers in the universities 
themselves. Whether the motive was to brand the Jew as inferior 
mentally, or to make him so through lack of education, is hard 
to say—probably it is merely another manifestation of the 
process which this paper aims to trace. 

In American institutions of higher learning there has been 
a growing problem of the increase of entering classes, as well 
as a growing perplexity at the number of Jewish immigrants 
who seek an advanced education. These young people often lack 
American manners and background, standing out from the great 
mass of the student body, whether for good or bad is immaterial. 
What more natural than that some would attempt to solve the 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 13 


two problems at once by excluding a certain percentage of these 
objectionable persons, at the same time cutting down enroll- 
ment? I do not speak of rumors that this purpose has been 
achieved in certain institutions by personal interviews, psy- 
chological tests, and the like, even though statistics seem to bear 
out this interpretation. I consider only the Harvard incident, 
which is public and official. 

In June 1922 President Lowell of Harvard, in his address at 
the,graduation exercises drew attention to the double phase of 
the problem, the increase of registration and the danger to the 
social and personal standard of the university, and recommended 
its full investigation by committees of the faculty and board 
of trustees of the university. The sensation caused by this 
bringing into the open of a subject long covertly agitated, 
especially in view of the large Jewish population of Boston, and 
fairly large registration at Harvard, was extreme. The matter 
came to an end April 9, 1923, when the committee recommenda- 
tion was accepted by the Board of Overseers for the University. 
The report recommended : 


In the administration of rules for admission Harvard College maintains 
its traditional policy of freedom from discrimination on grounds of race 
or religion. Concerning proportional representation, your committee is 
unanimous in recommending that no departure be made from the policy 
that has so long approved itself—the policy of equal opportunity for all, 
regardless of race or religion. Any action liable to interpretation as an 
acceptance of the principle of racial discrimination would to many seem 
like a dangerous surrender of traditional ideals. 


The report even avoids recommending any test of personal 
fitness which might be interpreted as a cover for racial or relig- 
ious discrimination. 

2. A further expression of anti-Semitism appeared in the 
form of books and magazine articles. ‘‘The Cause of World 
Unrest,’’ an English book, was reprinted in 1920 by G. P. Put- 
nam’s Sons of New York; ‘‘The Protocols of the Meetings of 
the Zionist Men of Wisdom’’ by Small, Maynard and Co. of 
Boston in the same year; ‘‘The Jews in America’’ by Burton 
J. Hendrick, appeared as a series of articles in the World’s 
Work, and was issued later as a book by Doubleday Page and Co. 


14 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


of New York in 1923. Periodicals such as ‘‘The Searchlight’’ 
of Atlanta, the ‘‘Fellowship Forum’’ of Washington, D. C., and 
‘‘The American Standard’’ of New York City (to mention only 
a few of a large number) conducted an active campaign against 
Jews and Catholies, which still continues. 

Most conspicuous of all was the long series of articles on the 
Jewish problem carried by the Dearborn Independent of Dear- 
born, Mich., the personal organ of Mr. Henry Ford. This series 
began in May, 1920; the four booklets containing their reprinted 
form are dated, the first on November, 1920; the fourth, May 
1922. They take ostensibly the position that international finance, 
under the leadership of certain Jews, is endeavoring to rule 
the world. Actually, however, they use any anti-Semitie theme 
that comes to hand, from the race theory to articles on the **‘Jew- 
ish liquor trust’’ and ‘‘the Jewish aids of Benedict Arnold.’’ 
Their chief arsenal of material is the Protocols of the Learned 
Elders of Zion, referred to above, a purported record of secret 
meetings held by leaders of world Jewry with the object of over: 
throwing the gentile nations and ruling the world themselves. 
This work first saw the light in Russia in 1901 and was utilized 
in 1905 as part of the propaganda against the abortive revoin- 
tion of that year; it was the work of one Serge Nilus. Later 
study has shown it to be a forgery, largely copied from a French 
political pamphlet directed against Napoleon III and published 
in Brussels in 1865 by Maurice Joly under the title, ‘* Dialogues 
in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu’’! The Russian 
editions of this work, and those in German, as well, included 
virulent attacks on Britain and America as representatives of 
liberalism, and therefore of Judaism; naturally, these have been 
omitted from the English versions. 

3. This agitation could not remain theoretical—in fact, prob- 
ably the theory was itself a late product of a broader tendency. 
The Johnson immigration act, setting the quota of immigrants to 
be admitted to the United States on the basis of their proportion 
in this country in 1890, was avowedly planned on a racial basis 
to encourage immigrants from northern and western Europe, 
and exclude those from eastern and southern Europe and from 
other continents. Secretly there seems to have been both anti- 


Anti-Semitism in the United States ah 


Jewish and anti-Catholic sentiment involved, as certain partisan 
publications boast quite openly. 

By far the most significant expression of anti-Semitism in the 
United States is the Ku Klux Klan, which will later be consid- 
ered in some detail. At this point it is sufficient to point out 
that the Klan was organized in 1915 by William J. Simmons of 
Atlanta, Ga., and became a national movement in 1920. Its 
name and much of its ritual are taken from the Ku Klux Klan 
of 1867-71, but its motives are quite different, for the old Klan 
was a local movement intended to protect the defeated Con- 
federacy, to overawe the negroes and to oppose the North; while 
the modern Klan is not sectional, but in every section opposes 
the negro, the Jew, the Catholic and the foreign-born. Its mem- 
bership is exclusively ‘‘white, gentile, Protestant American’’ 
and it therefore claims to be the only ‘‘one hundred per cent. 
Americans’’. The Klan defends its purpose and attacks the 
proscribed groups by business boycott, political opposition, 
sometimes even by threats or by physical violence. The Klan 
is the most important symptom at hand of the nature of anti- 
Semitism in the United States, beside being a most significant 
type of social grouping and of social motive. 

4. A final type of anti-Semitism in America was a direct 
importation from Europe through a group of Russian emigrés, 
some of them living in this country as private citizens, others 
as employees of the section on Russia of the Department of 
State. These men were bitterly anti-Soviet, anti-radical, and 
(whether for propaganda purposes, or through the convictions 
of the Russian aristocracy as a whole) bitterly anti-Semitic. 
Anti-Semitism is an article in the creed of every reactionary 
movement in Europe, with the single exception of the Italian 
Fascisti, and is strongest of all among the Russians. It seems 
to have been these people who persuaded Mr. Henry Ford of 
the authenticity of the Protocols, and introduced these to Amer- 
ica as a Whole. They seem also to have been active in the anti- 
radical agitation of the post-war period, which tried to identify 
foreigner, radical and Jew in the mind of the American people, 
and to attribute the Russian revolution, the Bolshevist govern- 


16 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


ment and the radical groups in America, alike to insidious 
Jewish influence. 

As this tendeney was not as public as the others, I give some 
proof of its existence. It was discussed in Hearst’s Interna- 
tional Magazine in 1923 in a series of articles by the editor, 
Norman Hapgood; and in the Bnai Brith Magazine of October 
and November, 1924, in two articles by Jacob Spolansky, a 
former agent of the United States Department of Justice, who 
was employed to hunt down radicals and if possible to find Jews 
among them. As the most official statement, I quote Mr. Louis 
Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, in his 
annual report to that body, delivered November 13, 1921?. 


The committee conducted an investigation with a view to discovering 
the identity of those who instigated the attacks against the Jews of 
America. It was found that they consisted of a group of Russian emigrés 
who had wormed themselves into the confidence of some Americans who, 
in turn, had succeeded in securing the assistance of others whose co-opera- 
tion was given either because they were gullible and believed the fantastic 
inventions of men schooled in intrigue in the Russian police system, or 
because they already cherished ill-will against Jews and were ready to 
assist in any movement through which they could satisfy real or fancied 
grudges. 


In the report of the same body, October 19, 1919,? reference is 
made to the hearing before the sub-committee of the Judiciary 
Committee of the United States Senate in February 1919, 
when— 


Dr. George Simons, who had been for a number of years in Russia, testi- 
fied regarding the alleged activities of Jews in the Bolshevist movement in 
Russia and stated that the present conditions there are due, in large part, 
to the activities of Yiddish agitators from the East Side of New York City 
who went to Russia immediately following the overthrow of the Czar. 
Dr. Simons stated further that the Bolshevist movement in Russia was 
being supported financially and morally by certain elements on the East 
Side of New York City. 


There is, then, an anti-Semitic movement in America, and 
has been since 1919 or 1920. Its philosophy of racialism, ex- 
clusiveness and ‘‘hundred per cent.’’ Americanism, is derived 


+American Jewish Yearbook, volume 24, page 343. 
? Yearbook, Vol. 22, pages 410-11. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States Li? 


largely from the Voelkische parties of Germany and other 
nations of Europe, which lay great stress on Aryan race and 
especially on its Nordic or Teutonic branch. The extreme of 
this position is found in the apparently well reasoned position 
of Burton J. Hendricks, who attempts to prove that the Spanish 
and German Jews were desirable because white, but that the 
Russian Jews are undesirable immigrants because they are de- 
scended from the Chazars, a Tartar tribe which embraced Juda- 
ism in the ninth century. The premises of this writer seem 
untenable, and the conclusions do not necessarily follow on them. 
Much of this anti-Semitic literature and public action seems to 
be based on similar rationalizations of intolerance, of group 
prejudice. 

In studying this anti-Semitic movement in America as a 
crucial example of the relations of group and sub-group, I stand 
in the contrary danger, that of rationalizing the inferiority com- 
plex of a persecuted group. My only justification for facing 
this danger is that nobody can approach this type of problem 
without one danger or the other, and the subject is. too vital 
to be entirely neglected. I can only hope that my analysis of 
the underlying problem of the nature of human groups and of 
their interrelations may be made in such a scientific spirit that 
the application of my theory to the special problem of anti- 
Semitism in the United States may be of some value in the clear- 
ing up of this great field of human action. 


CHAPTER I. 


THE “GROUP MIND?’ 
A DEFINITION AND A DESCRIPTION 


The causes of intolerance rest, not in what men say but in 
what they do. The reasons alleged for dislike or suspicion of 
the Jew are valuable merely for showing a state of mind in the 
anti-Semite himself, not for revealing the actual reasons for 
his attitude. For that reason I shall disregard these reasons 
very largely in searching for the causes of anti-Semitism in 
America. Instead, I shall turn to the field of social study to 
find out how groups of men act toward one another, and why 
and under what circumstances intolerance is one of their by- 
products. I shall apply to the phenomena of group life the 
method of behaviorism, now being adopted by sociology from 
its original field of psychology, in such definitions as that of 
E. C. Lindeman:* ‘‘Sociology is the science of collective 
behavior.’’ 


ik 


The prevailing view of students of society seems now to be 
that society is a natural phenomenon on the mental plane. 
Human society is not now regarded, as by Buckle, as a reflection 
of environment, even though the importance of physical back- 
ground and racial constitution must be recognized. As Charles 
A. Ellwood says,' ‘‘Society is a group of psychically interacting 
individuals.’’ ‘‘The essential element in the social process is 
the psychical element.’’? That is to say, mental material—in- 
stincts, emotions, feeling, and ideas—are the plane on which 
groups of individuals combine into social structures, operate in 
social functions, develop to social progress. Relations between 
individuals (except for the limited biological function) are 


1 Social Discovery, p. 21. 
1 Sociology in its Psychological Aspects, p. 13. 
27ibid, p. 94. 

18 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 19 


mental relations, carried on through physical media such as 
postures, speech and writing. 

These mental interactions of human beings are not an arti- 
ficial construct from primitive egoism by the social contract or 
any other method. William MacDougall is almost alone in hold- 
ing that the social sentiments are derived from the self-regard- 
ing ones through the operation of the tender emotion and the 
parental instinct. Hobhouse says:! ‘‘The conception of a prim- 
itive egoism on which, sociality is somehow overlaid is without 
foundation in either biology or psychology.’’ John Dewey puts 
this view most forcibly: 


?The fact is that the life, the experience, of the individual man, is 
already saturated, thoroughly interpenetrated, with social inheritance and 
references. . . . Education, language, and other means of communication 
are infinitely more important categories of knowledge than any of those 
exploited by absolutists. And as soon as the methodological battle of 
instrumentalism is won . . . the two services that will stand to the credit 
of instrumentalism will be calling attention first to the connection of 
intelligence with a genuine future, and second, to the social constitution of 
personal, even of private experience, above all of any experience that has 
assumed the knowledge form. 


And Ellwood adds—expressing here the general opinion of both 
sociologists and modern social philosophers—‘‘ All human con- 
sciousness is socially conditioned .... This is as true of the 
racially inherited aspects of consciousness—the feeling-instincts 
—as it is of the acquired traits.’’ Man is a social animal and 
his sociality is one of the few unescapable things about him. 
He is born in some kind of a social group; he gets the most of 
his ideas from his association with others; his whole development 
is a give-and-take in which the take is from the first, and often 
remains, the greater element. 

But the recognition of this fact does not bind us to any one 
explanation of it. We do not need to accept the ‘‘ consciousness 
of kind’’ of Giddings, the ‘‘herd instinet’’ of Trotter, or the 
‘*imitation’’ of Tarde,—in fact, we may very well consider that 
there is no one principle to explain so universal and complex a 


1 Hobhouse: Morals in Evolution, p. 339. 
? The Philosophical Review, 1912, vol. 21, p. 81. 


20 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


phenomenon; that these terms and others like them are in no 
sense explanations, but merely different words for the same fact, 
that man is a naturally gregarious or social being. We may 
rather turn to the more generalized modes of expressing this 
conception, the group mind or general will, as developed by 
Durkheim, Wundt and in our day:by Baldwin, MacDougall, 
and others. 


2. 


Before attacking this problem directly, I must clear away 
several misconceptions of the ‘‘group mind,’’ which I cannot 
accept as a part of this theory. First, this thesis need not ex- 
clude the operation of physical and biological forces on social 
groups, any more than it excludes their operation on any in- 
dividual, who is also a psychological unit. Society may well 
be a unit, just as the individual is, in a world of varying forces 
—climate, birth rates, and the like. Second, a theory of group 
mind may be empirical, and need not necessarily rest on an idea- 
listie conception of the Volksgeist. By adopting the historical 
method, rather than the statistical, relying on values to indicate 
our problem rather than trying to express it in terms of natural 
science, we shall find ourselves treating the theory of the group 
in a realistic and empirical way, eschewing the dogmatism of 
applying a priori principles to human material, and the equal 
fallacy of considering minds in the same terms as chemical 
elements.° | 

Third, a modern social psychology need not be a literal tran- 
seription of Durkheim or Wundt, relying on an antiquated 
psychology for its analogies and its basic conceptions. A theory 
of group mind today must recognize that personality is not 
always a unity, that it is never a complete unity; the vast field 
of the unconscious in mental life has just been opened to view. 
Both of these conceptions apply to the mental life of men in great 
masses as truly as when alone. Neither the individual nor the 
group is something hard, fixed and static; neither can be summed 
up as a group of faculties or a system of ideas. Both individual 


*See Dennes: Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology, especially 
Chap. IX. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States a 


and group must be conceived in process, to take the words of 
Lindemann,‘ as ‘‘the total equipment with which man responds 
to his environment, all that enters into behavior from the side of 
human nature.’’ 

Some views of group mind are vitiated for our present pur- 
pose by the narrow limits they impose, or by the one-sided way in 
which they arrive at their definitions. This applies especially to 
those who use the mob as the typical group and consider ‘‘ crowd- 
mindedness’’ (to use Everett Dean Martin’s term) as a synonym 
of sociality. The crowd, the herd, the mob are various terms 
for an exceptional type of group of human beings, bound to- 
gether by physical presence, transformed by a powerful emo- 
tion, launched finally into unified and often violent action. But 
as Baldwin says:° ‘‘The mind of the crowd is essentially a tem- 
porary, unorganized, ineffective thing . ... The mob is a by- 
product of society, it is the exaggeration of the normal.’’ 
Finally, the group mind need not be expressed entirely in terms 
of instinctive adaptation, any more than the mind of the indi- 
vidual; either may have many types, may be instinctive or im- 
pulsive or rational, may have a growing sense of rationality and 
a growing power of independent, deliberate action. In opposi- 
tion to MacDougall, with his elaborate system of instincts and 
sentiments, we may place the vast majority of students of the 
problem, Cooley, Platt, Ellwood, Baldwin, and so on. Even 
when the members of a group all use reason to a very high 
degree, they still constitute a group if they have organization 
and some method of reaching a general decision, as in a congress, 
a national association of scientists, or a business corporation. 

Obviously, human beings form many kinds of groups, and 
there would then, on an empirical basis, be many varieties of 
group minds. Individuals fall into many classes, as we all know, 
primitive and cultured, ignorant and educated, the infant, the 
child and the adult, the moron and the genius. So with the 
group. There are large and small groups, from families to 
nations; temporary and permanent ones, from the theatre 


4Page 115. 
5 Baldwin: Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 248. 


2 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


audience to the church; simple and complex, from town meet- 
ing to a Federal union, comprising states, counties, cities and 
townships; unorganized and organized; groups founded on 
physical presence, like a baseball team, and international 
bodies of scientists or philosophers who may form ‘‘a school 
of thought’’ but may never hold a meeting. The study of these 
various types is not only interesting in itself; it may help us 
in formulating the principle of the mind of the group as a whole. 
To begin with the definition of the primitive group by Franz 
Boaz: 


*There are a number of primitive hordes to whom every stranger not a 
member of the horde is an enemy, and where it is right to damage the 
enemy to the best of one’s power and ability, and if possible to kill him. 
This custom is based largely on the idea of the solidarity of the horde, 
and on the feeling that it is the duty of every member of the horde to 
destroy all possible enemies. . . . The feeling of the fellowship in the 
horde corresponds to the feeling of unity in the tribe, to a recognition of 
bonds established by a neighborhood of habitat, and further on to the 
feeling of fellowship among members of nations. 


‘‘He who is not with me is against me,’’* said Jesus for the 
religious group. How far we have proceeded from the horde 
in our civilized nations, and how near we are to it still in the 
essential character of the mind of the group! 


3. 


Does the group mind exist? Not as a super-consciousness, 
external to the individuals composing it—that view has been 
discarded long ago. . But as a category which is needed to ex- 
plain many phenomena, and which we can then proceed to study 
and explain in greater detail, a term with pragmatic value, such 
as ‘‘life’ or ‘‘mind.’’ ‘‘Life’’ is no longer used as a principle 
of explanation, as a vital principle which is infused into dead 
matter, but life exists, for all that, and we can see its effects 
and study them. ‘‘Mind’’ is not something separate and distinct 
from the body in which it dwells or from the world in which 
it acts, but we know that mind is a useful and necessary category 


* Boaz: Mind of Primitive Man, p. 207. 
7 Matthew, 12:30. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States — a7 


in which to include a whole phase of living being, especially of 
human life. ‘‘Group Mind’’ is the same sort of category as 
these. Just as mind inheres in the neurones and is coincident 
with the chemical changes in them, and yet cannot be summed 
up by chemical changes; so group mind inheres in the brains. 
of individuals and is coincident with individual ideas and acts, 
yet cannot be summed up as so many individual responses but 
as the unified response of a group of persons at once. 

Morris Ginsberg, in his Psychology of Society, opposes any 
type of group theory, as he sees only individuals in a social 
environment; he holds that the group may have unity of content 
but not of process, of ideas and ideals but not of mind. Floyd 
H. Allport speaks of ‘‘The group fallacy,’’ * ‘‘the error of sub- 
stituting the group as a whole as a principle of explanation in 
place of the individuals in the group,’’ to which Emory S. 
Bogardus replies in his discussion that ° ‘‘if there is a group 
fallacy, there is also an individual fallacy.’’ 

On the other hand, so radical a behaviorist as E. C. Lindeman 
remarks, *° ‘‘The group is a plurality of individuals, but what 
the group does is not plural but singular.’’ 7 ‘‘From the purely 
descriptive point of view, the group becomes a new quality.’’ 
Dr. M. M. Davis puts it this way: +? ‘‘Millions of brain cells 
are co-ordinated to think as one brain. Psychology tries to. 
tell how. Millions of brains co-ordinate themselves and function | 
in many ways as one brain. The how of that marvel is for | 
sociology.’’ Giddings calls the group mind ‘‘the concert of 
thought, emotion and will’’ of individual minds. Cooley says: 
13 “*The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but 
in organization.’’ Ellwood phrases it somewhat differently : 

* The only unity we have in society is a unity of process. The individual 
consciousness is unified both structurally and functionally. . . . There is: 


a collective mental life, but no social mind in the same sense in which- 
there is an individual mind. 


® Allport: American Journal of Sociology, May 1924, p. 691. 
®Bogardus: American Journal of Sociology, May 1924, p. 703. 
10Lindeman: Social Discovery, p. 44. 

4 Lindeman: Social Discovery, p. 120. 

“Davis: Psychological Interpretations of Society, p. 9. 

143 Cited in Elwood, p. 330. 

14 Ellwood, p. 330. 


24 Anti-Semitism in the Umted States 


Dr. Baldwin sums up his view in the last sentences of the Social 
and Ethical Interpretations: 

Society is the form of natural organization which ethical personalities 
come into in their growth. Ethical personality is the form of natural 
development which individuals grow into who live in social relationships. 
The true analogy, then, is not that which likens it to a physiological 
organism, but rather that which likens it to a psychological organization. 


And so, if this were primarily a historical study, I might go 
over many similar and differing theories, which consider the 
group as a unity on the mental plane, that is, in one sense or 
another, as a group mind. 

The material is still being collected for this study, the essential 
points of view still being defined, and such important factors 
as instinet and intelligence are still being redefined with the 
rapid progress of science today. As several of the terms cited 
above suggest, the difference between the individual as a mind 
and the group of individuals as a mind is always given and 
must always be given in terms of structure. In the words of 
Lindeman: 

** The individual may be viewed as an integration of functioning organs, 
and the group merely an integration of functions. . . . There can be noth- 


ing organic about society or a group; there can be only a series of rela- 
tions, the results of specific responses to specific situations. 


Not to cite more opinions on a point on which there seems 
general agreement, we may take it for granted that the chief, 
perhaps the only difference historically pointed out between 
the mind of one man and of a group of men is that the man has a 
brain and a nervous system, while the group has neither, but 
operates apparently through the brains and nervous systems of 
its members. But in their functioning, in their activities, the 
mind of the man and of the nation or other group are so similar 
as to be almost indistinguishable. 

Of course, this distinction depends, finally, on the definition 
of mind which we are prepared to accept. Dennes gives an 
adequate summary and criticism of Durkheim, for instance, 
who considered collective mind to consist of the collective ideas 


1 Baldwin, p. 571. 
16 Lindeman, p. 136. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 25 


or representations of a society; and of Wundt, who considered 
mind an integration of processes, not of ideas, and therefore 
sought for the group mind in the collective results of group 
mental process, in speech, religion and custom. But Dennes 
himself seems confused by the need of defining mind without 
regard to bodily structure. He says: 1% ‘‘Individual minds or 
persons have or produce bodies as well as objective mental 
products. But social groups are not minds and have no bodies. 
They are associations of minds.’’ MacDougall defines mind as 
18°“ An organized system of mental or purposive forces,’’ and 
continues, ‘‘In the sense so defined, every highly organized 
human society may be properly said to possess a group mind.’’ 
While MacDougall’s definition seems circular in nature, it still 
recognizes that a functional definition of mind can make no 
distinetion of structure, whether any particular mind is asso- 
ciated with one or many bodies. Lindeman ealls mind 7° ‘‘the 
total equipment with which man responds to his environment’’, 
which seems more than one ean accept, for ‘‘total equipment’”’ 
would include hands and feet, as well as mind. A more precise 
statement of the same general tenor appears in Dr. Singer’s 
Mind as Behavior: 


*° Consciousness is not something inferred from behavior; it is behavior. 
Or, more accurately, our belief in consciousness is an expectation of 
probable behavior based on an observation of actual behavior, a belief to be 
confirmed or refuted by more observation, as any other belief in a fact 
is to be tried out. 


Thus, any functional definition of mind that has no reference 
to brain or nervous system, must apply and does apply in the 
group of persons in exactly the same sense as to the single 
individual. If there is ‘‘unified behavior,’’ if there is ‘‘organ- 
ized system of purposes,’’ if there is ‘‘response to environment,”’ 
then we have mind, whether the behavior, response, or purpose 
dwell in one or two or many bodies. 

One question remains, and a most perplexing one. How can 


17Dennes: Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology, p. 145. 
148 MacDougall: Group Mind, p. 12. 

19 Lindeman, p. 115. 

20 Singer, p. 10. 


26 Anti-Semitism in the Unmted States 


one distinguish between a group mind and a group purpose, or 
the accidental coincidence of many minds and many purposes? 
A flock of migrating birds has no group mind—each bird would 
travel south at the same time and the same rate of speed, were 
there no flock at all. Or still lower forms, such as unicellular 
organisms, may move simultaneously to warmer waters. On the 
other extreme, the hordes of Huns led by Attila had a group 
purpose in their migration; the leader gave the word, and the 
followers leaped together to their horses’ backs to ride from 
Asia into Europe. But when a half million negroes migrate 
from the southern to the northern states in a few years, coming 
family by family, as the opportunity affords, yet with a steady 
tendency of drift, is that a group mind or the accidental agree- 
ment of many individuals? Is it mind or minds? And the 
same problem is present in a declaration of war, or the victory 
of a foot-ball team, or the adoption of a new fashion of clothes. 
When does the group act and when the individual members? 
When do we have the mind of all, when the mind of each? 

To this crucial problem I must present one qualification and 
one answer. The qualification is: the group never acts except 
through its constituent individuals, any more than the mind 
acts without its brain cells and bodily organs. The difference 
between the act of all and the act of each is not a complete dis- 
junction but a difference of emphasis, of interpretation, of pur- 
pose. When the army marches, every soldier goes ahead; when 
the nation elects its president, the millions of voters cast their 
ballots; when the church adopts a creed or reforms its ritual, 
the many believers experience a change in their faith and their 
hope. Not that group opinion need be unanimous; it is rather 
a mode of general consent by which unified action can arise out 
of conflicting opinions, by which many individuals are absorbed 
into a group mind. Thus in many, perhaps in most cases we 
cannot say definitely: this is group mind, not personal prefer- 
ence, or this is individual action, and the group has nothing to 
do with it. The problem is much lke that which faced Kant 
in defining moral action, when the demands of the universal 
law may often coincide with personal preference, perhaps even 
with the greatest and most appealing happiness. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States op 


And our answer may be similar to his. Kant turned to the 
test case. We know we have morality, said he, when duty and 
pleasure are opposed, and the man obeys the voice of duty. 
Similarly, we can say: we know that we have group mind and 
purpose when the pleasure of the individual is opposed to the 
will of the group, and the individual gives up his purpose for 
that of the army, the nation, the church. When the soldier or 
the martyr gives up his urge for self-preservation and offers his 
body to the bullets of the enemy or the stake of the persecutor, 
then we know that he has abdicated his individuality and is 
acting only as a member of the greater whole. Lindeman, whose 
study is based on observation of farmers’ co-operative societies, 
presents a contrary view: 


*It was formerly asserted that the chief significance of a group con- 
sisted in the fact that the individuals comprising it had sacrificed certain 
individual prerogatives, rights, privileges, etc., in order to achieve the larger 
collective end. But it could not be discovered that the farmers who became 
members of the co-operative associations had done anything of the sort. On 
the contrary, they were chiefly interested in enhancing their own individual 
interests; they desired a larger income from the sale of their products and 
the co-operative movement promised exactly this. 


If this were true, these associations would constitute merely a 
set of books, not a group of persons. But we see further on 
in the same book that the co-operative associations demanded 
loyalty even at the cost of whim or momentary interest; they 
enforced their contracts with the farmer by which he agreed 
to sell only through the association. If he got tired of waiting 
for his money, or if a dealer placed a financial premium on dis- 
loyalty, still he was expected to be loyal to the group. Finally, 
the group had to take cognizance of other aspects of the human 
life of its members besides the sale of their cotton or tobacco; 
it built up personal and social groupings for the entire family ; 
it became a truly unified group mind, through the slow process 
of integration of individuals and of local groups, resting on 
a basis of personal friendship. Thus, even in an interest group, 


21 Lindeman, p. 170. 


28 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


a true group mind is developed through participation and 
sacrifice. 


4. 


We are now ready to define group mind in the sense in which 
it will be understood in this essay. A group mind is the common 
purpose of two or more persons, which they accept as their own 
purpose. The mode of this acceptance or identification is in 
behavior, which includes the reasons given by the individuals— 
their rationalizations—as well as their overt acts. The test of 
this in any particular case is the test of sacrifice, whether the 
man acts as a self-preserving being, an individual pacifist, or as 
a citizen and soldier, a member of a group at war; whether the 
church member acts as an individual thinker, or subordinates 
his judgment to the interpretation and the practice of the 
church; whether the son acts as a loyal son, a member of the 
family, to his own hurt, or goes off to marry against his parents’ 
will, leaving them perhaps to suffer want. I have purposely 
taken examples where opinion may be divided, as it is not my 
purpose to attach moral right or wrong to either group loyalty 
or individual freedom; either may be right under given circum- 
stances, or judged by certain standards. 

The group mind may be conscious, as a deliberative assembly ; 
or instinctive and unconscious, as the racial group or the partly 
hypnotized mob. The ancient Israelite identified himself with 
his people; he did not even expect personal immortality, but 
desired sons to carry on his name so that his family and his 
people might be immortal. Parents are willing sacrifices for 
their children, but sacrifices nevertheless. The patriot volun- 
teers for dangerous duty consciously, or leaps over the parapet 
in the blind enthusiasm of a charge; whether conscious or un- 
conscious of the meaning of his act, he acts as a soldier, not 
a self-seeking person. The varieties of the group mind are 
almost innumerable. The group mind may be as instinctive 
and unorganized as a religious revival, as natural as a nation 
with its bonds of language, land, custom and government, as 
artificial as a military company without even a name, with only 
a number, and yet with a definite morale, a tradition, a person- 


Anti-Semitism m the United States 29 


ality of its own. The theater audience has a group mind, while 
the restaurant crowd has not; for it is an axiom in the theater 
that each audience has a character of its own, that only a full 
house really abandons itself at a comedy, while even a smaller 
erowd may be carried away by a tragedy, and so on; the indi- 
vidual abandons his own judgment and his inhibitions at least 
in part, to react to the performance as a member of the group. 

Aceording to this definition, the individual also may have a 
group mind, as his diverse purposes are summed up in one 
supreme purpose, or as he has inner conflicts, the far-sighted 
against the narrow view, the better ideal against the worse. The 
reasons or motives which animate the various members of a 
group mind need not always be the same; they may range from 
deliberate choice to compulsion by public opinion or the blind 
following of herd instinct, the desire to ‘‘run with the crowd,’’ 
to ‘‘be on the band wagon.’’ There is always a margin of un- 
assimilated purpose in either the individual or the group; 
neither mind ever quite attains perfect unity. Durkheim makes 
the pregnant suggestion, (not without its eritics, it is true,) 
that the most unified mind was that of the primitive horde, 
where unity was achieved by identity; while developed societies 
achieve unity through organization and division of function, 
thus including the most diverse elements in a genuine unity of 
co-operation and purpose. 

The group mind, then, is an empirical fact, which can be 
perceived in many practical ways. The intellectual content, the 
emotional coloring, group habits which we call custom, group 
ideas which we eall tradition, group organization by which a 
consensus of opinion is ascertained for the purpose of unified 
action—all are characteristics of the group mind, just as the 
parallel factors of ideas, emotion, and will are the phases into 
which we analyze the mind of the individual. There is a differ- 
ence in every one of these factors between the group mind of 
America and of China, between that of ancient Greece and of 
medieval Italy. And the difference lies not only in factors such 
as language, religion and history, which are constitutive to the 
group, but external to the individual. It hes also in subtler 
matters of opinion, of emotions, which seem to be within the 


30 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


individual and yet must be absorbed from the environment, be- 
cause they differ so strikingly from group to group. I shall go 
carefully into the reasons further on which impel me to con- 
sider that the Jewish people possess a group mind, even though 
they have no common government, language or land, and have 
even many divisions on questions of faith and religious prac- 
tice. Here it is sufficient to note that the Jewish people act as 
one under attack; that a pogrom in Russia arouses the very 
different Jews of France, England and America to a feeling 
of unity and acts of relief and of defense. Labor and capital 
are becoming ‘‘class conscious’’ in opposition to each other; 
that is, group minds are in process of formation. The group 
mind appears in the behavior of the group through its constit- 
uent individuals, whether the group be a static one, dominated 
by the fixed habits of custom, or a dynamic one, with a great 
wave of progress; for behavior includes both custom and prog- 
ress. 

One more point comes properly under the definition of the 
group mind—the wide-spread conception of a general will, or 
more precisely a common will. According to the viewpoint of 
this study, the general will is no mystical entity, overpowering 
the wills of the individuals; nor is it an arithmetical average, 
in which personal opinions cancel each other out. Neither of 
these theories covers a willing mind. The group will is a resul- 
tant, not an average; one element in it is tradition, another is 
leadership, a third is the interaction of the various sub-groups. 
In the final result, the negative element is often actually erased, 
the wavering members accept the winning opinion as a whole, 
and the consequent group action is a unity, almost a unanimity 
of response. After war is declared the peace party practically 
disappears. In less clear-cut issues, we see the workings of com- 
promise, which again appears in the behavior of the group as 
a whole. 

Group consciousness exists when the individuals identify 
themselves with the group, not merely accepting its purpose but 
losing their own purposes in it. Consciousness implies also in- 
telligence, as it does in the individual; it may co-exist with a 
high emotional tone but must have a rational element as well. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 31 


MacDougall utters a view in consonance with that held here 
when he says: 
*It is the extension of the self-regarding sentiment of each member to 


the group as a whole that binds the group together and renders it a col- 
lective individual capable of collective volition. 


But when he holds **that groups are self-conscious according to 
the degree that the idea of them is present in the minds of the 
individuals composing them, then we must agree with Dennes 
that: 

4 to say that a group mind possesses self-consciousness in the sense that 


its nature is consciously apprehended by individual minds distinct from it, 
is the utterance of a contradiction. 


It will then be necessary to posit group consciousness as we 
posit individual consciousness, not distributively but collec- 
tively. We have group mind and group will when the group 
acts aS one or behaves as one; but we have group consciousness 
when the group thinks as one. Not that this action can possibly 
take placa outside of the individual minds; MacDougall is un- 
doubtedly right in his citation of E. Barker: ?°‘‘There is no 
group mind existing apart from the minds of the members of 
the group; the group mind exists only in the minds of its mem- 
bers. But nevertheless it exists.’’ Yet the group mind must in- 
clude the individual minds in a unified purpose, to which they 
relinquish their own wills, willingly or with a struggle, whose 
ideas are their ideas, whose consciousness is, to a certain extent 
at least, their consciousness. If it is. possible, in ordinary 
speech, to recognize that a man acts now personally, again as a 
-ehurchman, a citizen, or a committee member, it should be pos- 
sible to accept this fact as a part of our theory and to embody 
it as one phase of the theory itself. The individual and the 
group are not enutually exclusive; neither exists without the 
other; the group is a part of the individual mind as much as 
the individual is a part of the group mind. 

24MacDougall: Group Mind, p. 78. 

23 MacDougall: Group Mind, p. 158. 

24Dennes: Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology, p. 120. 


* Barker: Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present 
Day. 


CHAPTER II. 


GROUPS IN | CONTACT 
ih 


Theoretically, the individual might be independent of other 
individuals and of groups as well. He might be his own alter, 
so that through the active and reflective standpoints working on 
each other the individual himself might constitute a group 
mind, and might produce many, if not all, the characteristic 
products of the group.? But practically in society, the exact op- 
posite is invariably the case. According to Baldwin’s dialectic 
of the individual development: *‘‘The sense of self always in- 
volves a sense of the other.’’ *‘‘The real self is always the bi- 
polar self, the social self.’’ Empirically, not only are civiliza- 
tion, history and government the products of social heredity ; 
the individual himself as we have him owes his mental content, 
many of his feeling and motor responses, and his ultimate ideals, 
to the group in which he was born and has developed. On this 
basis the ancient conflict between the isolated individual and 
the group domination becomes unimportant, if not meaningless 
from the empirical point of view. As Joseph K. Hart remarks: 


*Membership in the group establishes in the members a set of habits 
which are the personal counterpart of the customs of the group; the group 
is not outside and around him; it is inside him; what is custom in the group 
has become habit in him. 


Why, then, the eternal conflict between the individual and 
the group? Why does a Schiller or an Ibsen proclaim, ‘‘The 
strongest man is he who stands most alone’’? Why do we have 
the group portrayed so often as the oppressor, the individual as 
the hero, genius, and martyr to the conventional ideas of the 
mass? Because the group has more fixed habits than the indi- 
vidual, or at least than the exceptional individual; because in 
most individuals the group factor is the dominant one by pref- 

1 Singer: Mind as Behavior, chapter on The Man Without a Fellow. 


2 Baldwin: Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 22. *p. 30. 
4Hart: The Survey, March 15, 1924. 


32 


Anti-Semitism in the United States a3 


erence, and the struggle against it is both rare and mild; be- 
cause, finally, the group mind does involve a sacrifice of the 
individual purpose on many occasions, and these are the test 
eases of the strength of the group itself. There are really two 
types of individuals who stand out from the group—the genius, 
or social discoverer; the criminal, or social rebel. Platt sug- 
gests that ‘Man has never become entirely socialized’’; his 
biological heredity always lags behind the social heredity of the 
group and leaves a residuum of conflict. Baldwin gives a 
broader theory, which may include this: ‘The individual is 
the particularizing social force; society is the generalizing so- 
cial foree.’’ That is, the individual produces variations, which 
are then stamped out by social disapproval, or generalized by 
social acceptance. The genius thinks for the race; the mass of 
individuals have their thinking done for them by the prepared 
reactions of the group. Without the social group the indi- 
vidual would be as unformed mentally, as helpless ethically, 
as is the single bee without the hive. In Baldwin’s words: 
“A man is a social outcome rather than a social unit.’’ 

All this by the way; if I were to take up the problem of the 
individual and group, it would occupy this entire study. I 
merely want to show its bearing on the central thesis here 
brought forward, which concerns the relation between group 
and group, rather than that between individual and group. 


2. 


The problem of group and sub-group can be approached 
either descriptively or genetically. If we take the former angle, 
we see every large group divided indefinitely into small, con- 
flicting, overlapping, and infinitely various sub-groups. Much 
of the complexity of our society consists in this overlapping, 
by which the individual belongs to many groups at once, so 
that his mind cannot attain complete unity, and none of his 
groups can possess him wholly. A man belongs to a family, 
a city, a profession, a church, a school alumni body, a nation 

*Platt: The Psychology of Social Life, p. 188. 


6 Baldwin, p. 462. 
* Baldwin, p. 96. 


34 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


and an international peace society. In addition, he may join 
a labor union, a chamber of commerce, or a half dozen fraternal 
orders. His mind is a perfect maze of group attitudes; he shifts 
from one group to another as interests or contiguity impel him. 
In the same way, a large group such as a political party includes 
members from different sections of the country, different eco- 
nomic strata, different churches, and so on. The group mind, as 
a category in this situation, is purely a functional unity, which 
works in and through its individual members and through its 
smaller groups of individuals in exactly the same way. I quote 
Dr. Singer: *®‘My world is highly organized—groups within 
groups, and groups within these,’’ for that is the scientific, real- 
istic view of the social world. 

Various classifications of »groups have been devised by stu- 
dents of the problem, useful for their different purposes. Cooley 
speaks of primary and secondary groups, those in which men 
and women are born and grow, and the larger integrations into 
which the smaller, more natural groups enter. Miller prefers 
** Vertical and horizontal groups,’’ the former being the natural 
divisions which include all classes, such as the nation; the latter 
a caste or class grouping. Hayes calls them personal and im- 
personal groups, apparently meaning much the same as Pro- 
fessor Cooley by the terms primary and secondary. Probably 
the most useful mode of classification is the genetic, beginning 
with the family, and then expanding according to the particu- 
lar situation in view—in the primitive group to the clan, tribe 
and confederacy; in the civilized to the school, the interest 
group, the religious affiliation, the political nation, the inter- 
national ideals and bonds of union. 

Whatever be the more or less arbitrary mode of classification, 
we see that, except for the supposititious primitive horde, groups 
are never single nor simple. They resemble rather the physical 
organism or the mind of the individual, either of which is neces- 
sarily complex. Group minds exist and grow by progressive 
integration of the lesser into the greater, from the individual 
up to the greatest possible bodies of human beings. 


8 Singer: Modern Thinkers and Present Problems, p. 289. 
® Miller: Raches, Nations and Classes, p. 14. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 35 


The group mind comes into being only through contact with 
other groups. We may go so far as to conclude that there must 
be two groups in order that there may be one group. If an iso- | 
lated island possessed a few people so unorganized that they felt | 
no difference of groupings among themselves, then there would 
be.no sense of a total group, either. Under those circumstances 
that would be attained only in case of an invasion by people 
from without the land, or a rebellion within, when group unity 
of the islanders would at once appear. If my previous iden- 
tification of mind in the individual and the group is exact, not 
merely an analogy, then this follows from Baldwin’s genetic 
study of the individual. The mind of the individual grows by 
constant reference to the alter—for in the thought of the child 
the ego and alter are one—and even in the highest reaches of 
moral judgment there remains an element of social approval, 
of what would be the judgment of the ideal group or the ideal 
comrade. 1%‘ We do right by habitually imitating a larger self 
whose injunctions run counter to the tendencies of our particu- 
lar selves.’’ 

To quote a few applications of this viewpoint to particular 
problems: Sumner applies it to the primitive horde: 


™ The relationship of comradeship and peace in the we-group and that of 
hostility and war toward others-group are correlative. War and peace have 
reacted on each other and developed each other, one within the group, the 
other in the inter-group relation. Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, 
hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without 
—all grow together, common products of the same situation. 


In Ellwoods’s words: 


“While the stimuli afforded by the struggle with the physical environ- 
ment are conceivably sufficient to bring about the highest degree of co- 
ordination, unity and solidarity in the larger human social groups, yet 
historically they have not done so. Rather, it has been the stimuli arising 
from the conflict and competition of one human group with another which 
has chiefly developed conscious social solidarity in the larger human group. 


10 Baldwin, p. 61. 
1 Sumner: Folkways, p. 12. 
12 Ellwood, p. 159. 


36 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


Dr. George E. Vincent wrote: 


** Conflict, competition, rivalry, are the chief causes which bring human 
beings. into groups. and largely determine what~goes~-on...within..them. 


| “It is in conflict or competition with other nations that a country becomes 


| a vivid unity to the members of its constituent groups. It is rivalry which 


‘Races, Nations and Classes,’ 


|| brings out the sense of team work, the social consciousness. 


? 


a recent work by Dr. Herbert 
A. Miller, presents a series of studies of social relations in terms 
of group conflicts, group oppression and group revolt, as these 
exist in various crucial situations today. 

Most of the treatments of the subject calmly assume that the 
other group with which contact is established must necessarily 
be parallel and competing with the first group. But in empiri- 
eal situations that is not always, perhaps not often the case. 
We may become conscious of our American unity in war with 
an external foe, but we may become equally conscious of it in 
inter-state relations; because an inter-state conflict may bring us 
to the superior federal power; or in the division of powers be- 
tween state and nation, or in the strong hand of the federal 
government reaching out to detect groups of law-breakers within 
the constituent states. That is, the two groups need not be par- 
allel and exclusive; they may overlap, or one may enclose the 
other entirely. JI can become conscious of my international 
Jewish loyalty in contrast to the Christian church, which also 
is international; or I may become conscious of it through the 
overlapping with my American citizenship; or even through 
contrast with a family loyalty, which might conceivably be en- 
hanced by disregarding the membership in the Jewish people, 
with its frequent disabilities. The first is a case of two separate 
groups; the second, two overlapping ones; the third, where one 
is a sub-group of the other. In this sense it. is conceivable, 
though not usual, for the individual with his own ‘‘group 
mind’’ to serve as a contrast to the group in which he is in- 
cluded. For in every one of these instances there has been ac- 
tual or potential relinquishment of purpose into the larger group 


which includes the smaller, or into the one which overlaps and 


18 Vincent: American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1912, p. 471. 
4%ibid, p. 483. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States ae 


conflicts with the other; and in the ease of two parallel groups 
there is a conflict and contrast of purposes, hence of group 
mind itself. 


3. 


The mode of group contacts has practically always been 
viewed in terms of conflict and competition. In contrast to this, 
I present the view that there are two modes of group contact-—— | 
competition and imitation. Competition strengthens and unites 
each competing group. Imitation brings the different groups | 
together into an overgroup. The two together constitute the 
social process (if we allow for the element of individual initia- 
tive and leadership, which hardly comes within the special topic 
of this study). 

The classic presentation of group struggle is by Gumplowitz, 
in his ‘‘Rassenkampf,’’ where he took Gobineau’s rather crude 
theory of races and applied it to history and sociology, includ- 
ing also groups smaller and of different origin than the races 
themselves. To present Gumplowitz’s view in his own words: 


* History and the present day present us with a picture of almost un- 
broken warfare of tribe against tribe, people against people, state against 
‘ state, nation against nation. 

%* Every greater ethnic or social element strives to subdue to its purposes 
every weaker group which lies within its sphere of influence or near it. 


? 


This is his ‘‘social law of nature,’’ which he compares to the 
law of gravitation in its certainty. War is therefore necessary 
for civilized as for primitive societies, and any talk of ideals or 
of peace is but self-deception, if it be not deliberate masking of 
warlike intentions. The race theory of Gobineau has gone on 
until it is one of the important factors in American group op- 
positions today. And surprisingly enough, the conflict theory 
of Gumplowitz comes back also from time to time. In ‘‘Sur- 
vival or Extinction,’’ a new work by Elisha M. Friedman, I 
find this sentence: +*%‘‘The absorption of a scattered minority 
people is the inexorable law of History. Can the Jews hope to 
45 Gumplowitz, p. 176. 


16 Gumplowitz, p. 161. 
17 Friedman, p. 148. 


38 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


escape it?’’ This on the basis of Gumplowitz, whose treatment 
of the Jewish problem is very different; he criticized the Jews 
bitterly for being the one exception to his ‘‘inexorable law,’ 
and said they should have obeyed it and been absorbed among 
the nations, as were the Phoenicians two thousand years ago. 

Certainly there is group struggle; it is a natural tendency 
when two different groups come into contact; and it is a gross 
and obvious phenomenon which nobody can help noticing. But 
at the same time there goes on also a subtler but equally signifi- 
cant movement of group imitation. The white settlers fought 
the Indians in a way that everybody knew; many have missed 
the adoption by the whites of maize and tobacco, names of rivers 
and sites of cities; by the Indians of the horse, the rifle and the 
religion of the conquerors. Rome conquered Greece in war, and 
Rome imitated Greece in art and literature. Israel conquered 
Canaan and imposed the one God, destroying the high places 
where the earlier inhabitants had worshipped the powers of fer- 
tility in nature; but Israel incorporated the harvest festivals of 
the Canaanites into its own shepherd and nomad ritual. Group 
imitation takes its place beside group competition in the spread 
of culture elements about the earth, in the study of foreign lan- 
guages and literature, in missionary effort, in the adoption of 
new inventions for warfare or for industry. These are as im- 
portant and as omnipresent as business MUR or terri- 
torial rivalry, far more common than war. 

The function of group conflict is to strengthen the separate 
eroups and bring them to recognizable group mind. Loyalty is 
never so strong as when our group is under fire. War brings 
millions to an acute sense of national loyalty who have hardly 
felt they had a nation. The ancient loyalty of the Jew is largely 
due to the persecutors who constantly reminded him that he had 
no right to desert his people. There is definite survival value in 
this, which can easily be connected with the historic and pre- 
historic process which brought our present groups into being. 
As Dr. Miller says: +*‘Loyalty and patriotism are merely the 
emotional side of the group impulse. They measure the identity 


18 Miller: Races, Nations and Classes, p. 11. 


Anti-Semitism im the United States 39 


of the individual with his group.’’ Royce’s ‘‘Philosophy of 
Loyalty’’ is one long praise of these virtues of the loyal son 
of his group. His somewhat exaggerated discussion of the value 
of the “‘lost cause’’ for character development illustrates the 
overemphasis on group struggle which is typical of all those who 
long for group solidarity. For group struggle does bring soli- 
darity and loyalty except in the limiting case, where the group 
is destroyed in the struggle and there is nothing left to which 
we can be loyal. And that is precisely the case envisaged by 
Gumplowitz, the case of the stronger group crushing and then 
absorbing the weaker one. | 

Dr. Miller has worked out a type of group pathology which 
attacks both victor and victim of a group struggle. He ealls 
it the ‘‘Oppression Psychosis.’’ Its effects on the victor are 
found in such rationalizations as the ‘‘myth of superiority’’ and 
other defense complexes, leading to ‘‘cultocracy’’ or class rule, 
and finally if unchecked to the stagnation of caste. To quote: 

* Hundred per cent. patriotism and confidence in Nordic superiority are 
the two most dangerous ideas in the world today, because they lead in 
exactly the opposite direction from that which civilization must take if it 
is to survive. The fundamental objections to these ideas are, first, that 


they have no basis in fact, and second that the emotions which they 
organize, have far-reaching and disruptive consequences. 


The inferiority complex of the oppressed people has very dif- 
ferent and still more disastrous consequences. Dr. Miller points 
out that what are usually considered Jewish traits may be found 
also among the Irish, the Poles, and the Negroes, all very dif- 
ferent groups but all subject to oppression and therefore pre- 
senting a psychological reaction to oppression. 


*? What we have designated as Jewish characteristics are primarily based 
on the nervous reactions which have resulted from more varieties and 
longer oppression than those of any other group. The Jew is introspective, 
analytical, aggressive and conspicuous. The Negro also has many of the 
same characteristics, though he has not yet developed so many compensatory 
values, such as religious solidarity and business technique. . . . The most 
outstanding result of the oppression psychosis is to create a group solidarity 
which is far stronger than could have been created by any other means. 


19 Miller, p. 1385. 
20 Miller, p. 35-6, 


40 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


And he goes on to show the use of symbols as. compensatory 
mechanism of the oppressed group, and thus to account for the 
ardent clinging of such groups to their language or religion as 
the real outlet of their self expression and of their will for re- 
sistance. 

So far with conflict. Imitation of individuals has attracted 
much attention, especially through its exhaustive treatment by 
Gabriel Tarde, but group imitation has passed by with much 
less notice. However, we may fairly say that group imitation is 
aS universal a by-product of group contact as are rivalry and 
conflict. The immigrant comes to America, and the result of 
_ that transference of a group into a new environment can be ex- 
pressed in terms of either imitation or conflict, but can be 
summed up fully only by recognizing both processes at work 
at once. The children attend public schools, where they learn 
the English language, the salute to the flag, and some American 
' group customs. The father learns English at his work; the 
mother copies American fashions in dress and household; both 
become naturalized citizens—that is what we call Americaniza- 
tion. But at the same time they speak their native tongue in 
the home, they read a foreign language newspaper, they keep 
up their correspondence with the relatives back in the Old Coun- 
try, they belong to a patriotic or revolutionary society with its 
roots in the homeland. Often they even organize a school that 
their children may learn the language, religion and other essen- 
tials of their earlier group life. So the children often attend 
two schools, an American one to assimilate them to the group 
mind of America, a Polish or Russian or Jewish one to keep 
them in touch with the group mind of their parents’ allegiance. 
The hatreds of the central European peoples are transferred to 
America. The political issues between Czarist and Bolshevist, 
or between Fascismo and Socialism are perpetuated here. Some- 
times the contrast between American and alien is emphasized, 
and takes the place of the old-world conflicts in the center of 
consciousness. 

Conflict strengthens the fighting groups; imitation welds them 
together into an overgroup. The American process is one of 
forming a united people, an integrated, self-conscious group 


Anti-Semitism in the Umted States 4] 


mind, out of the many diverse elements which enter this conti- 
nent. And this goes on by conscious teaching and unconscious 
imitation, through social, political and economic motives, every- 
where except when interrupted by the counter process of op- 
pression and resistance. We speak nowadays of a Greco-Roman 
civilization, a direct recognition of the part that imitation 
played in the Roman empire with all its warlike power. We 
speak of modern European culture, recognizing that Huropean 
culture is one, with local variations indeed, and that art, science, 
philosophy and religion are international, for every group imi- 
tates every other. The trend of such a tendency can only lead 
toward an eventual amalgamation, not by abolishing present 
languages and parliaments, but by the growth of every sort of 
international and supernational consciousness, beginning with 
schools of literature or art, and culminating in a World Court 
or a League of Nations. 


4, 


This suggests the ideal of society which is implicit in our 
minds as we study its development by means of conflicting, 
imitating and overlapping group minds. The desirable qual- 
ities which this process evokes are heterogeneity and prog- 
ress. We thus steer midway between the equal dangers of 
uniformity and standardization, on the one hand, and the 
isolation of castes, on the other. The caste system of India 
provides plenty of heterogeneity, but because the groups are 
isolated from each other physically and mentally, because of 
the influence of ‘‘untouchability,’’ the mind of the group 
has never unified, never presented the possibility of change. 
The modern movement in India under Ghandi is precisely 
of this type, to unify India and introduce the concept of 
progress by a double process, by abolishing ‘‘untouchabil- 
ity’’ within and bringing the caste groups to imitate and emu- 
late each other; by strengthening loyalty through united oppo- 
sition to the common oppressor. It is a most significant example 
of the development of the group mind through union of sub- 
groups and by contrast to another hostile group. On the other 
hand, the beginning of modernity in Europe meant a radical op- 


42 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


position to the levelling influence of the Church universal, the 
rise of vernacular tongues, of national governments, of na- 
tional churches—that is, the dissociation of the medieval mind, 
which was European, into the sub-groups, which are primarily 
national. That the reverse movement is now taking place is sig- 
nificant, for this reverse movement is a natural one by imitation 
and common interests, not forced by the union of the Inquisi- 
tion and the secular arm. As Bernard Shaw remarks in the 
preface to ‘‘Saint Joan’’: 


Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is 
founded on tolerance. * We must persecute, even to the death; and all 
that we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is, first, to be very 
careful what we persecute, and second, to bear in mind that unless there is 
a large liberty to shock conventional people, and a well informed sense of 
the value of originality, individuality and eccentricity, the result will be 
apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which will 
eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive violence. 


We must then, conceive modern society, not as a simple unity 
but as an integration of group minds, from that of the indi- 
vidual, the family, the clique, up to that of the nation, with 
a dawning international mind now in process. These group 
minds struggle for domination and for existence; they learn 
from each other at the same time. The double process constantly 
in evidence is group conflict, resulting in the mind of the sub- 
group, and group imitation, resulting in the integration of the 
sub-groups into a larger and more inclusive mental entity. In 
addition, the various groups are not all parallel, but very largely 
crossing each other; one individual or sub-group may belong to 
several of them. Economic classes cross national boundaries, 
for both capital and labor are international. Most conspicuous 
of all, religious groupings are international and interracial, so 
that a man belongs to a church as well as a nation. In peace times 
the national will to dominate and the church ideal of peace are 
kept carefully as far apart in his mind as possible; the one com- 
ing into the center of consciousness on Sundays, the other on 
election day or similar occasions. In time of war, the two ac- 


% Shaw: ‘‘Saint Joan,’’ p. lvii. 7% Shaw, p. Ixi. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 43 


tively conflict within the group mind, and thus within the indi- 
vidual minds which belong to the group. : 

The accumulation of knowledge and the advancement of rea- 
son are accompanied by a progressive widening of the circle of 
the group mind, to include an ever larger number and variety 
of sub-groups. Dr. Baldwin suggests this process: **‘‘Group 
selection gives rise to what may be called the law of the widen- 
ing unit, that as the circle of co-operation widens the unit of 
survival, the group, taken as a whole, becomes larger.’’ The 
other side of the same process is the increasing complexity of 
the mind of the individual and the sub-group because of the 
richer world in which they exist—in Dr. Vincent’s words, 
24“The person has as many selves as there are groups to which 
he belongs. He is simple or complex as his groups are few and 
harmonious or many and conflicting.’’ The actual growth of 
an international mind today is evident, through scientific, re- 
ligious, artistic and economic influences; through the great al- 
liances of the World War; through the ease of communication 
and the spread of news and propaganda. A world-wide group 
mind, if such is possible, cannot and should not eliminate its 
sub-groups, but include them in a wider synthesis; even en- 
riching the complexity of the sub-groups by its further ramifi- 
cations and their further imitations. 

But the easy and natural way for such an international group 
mind is by conflict with a still different outside group. The 
white races would easily attain unity if there were a real race 
conflict against the colored races of the world; differences be- 
tween French and German, between Russian and American, 
would be swallowed up in a day. Unity of the entire human race 
would come instantly if we were invaded from Mars. The slo- 
gans of our earth-wide unity would be the defense of our beloved 
planet and the common descent of all human beings. In default 
of such a threat from without, is the international mind an im- 
possible hypothesis ? 

I suggest that actual contrasts exist which may make it pos- 
sible for a world-wide group mind to grow through the normal 


23 Baldwin, p. 191, footnote. 
24 Vincent: American Journal of Sociology, p. 479. 


44 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


mode of group conflict and group imitation and co-operation. 
Perhaps we can attain race unity by envisaging the forces of 
nature as the rival group, conceiving the inroads of the insect 
world as the threat against human domination which must make 
us spring to arms in a sense of our common unity and our com- 
mon nature. Perhaps we can conceive the national group as 
the contrasting element, and the international group mind as, 
not its enemy, but its synthesis. Finally, one all-inclusive mind 
actually does exist in the faith of most of the race—the ideal 
self of the group to which we give the name of God. The God- 
idea of the group is not the group itself, but is its outgrowth, 
its ideal self. Perhaps the future unity of mankind may come 
at last through a summation of its highest ideals and the ra- 
tional toleration of diverse interpretations, different personal- 
ities, and widely contrasting group customs and manners. At 
present, however, an outstanding phenomenon of the group mind 
is intolerance, and through a study of intolerance we can per- 
ceive much of group nature and of the actual life of human 
societies. 


CHAPTER III. 


TNE Ov Ee Roan, Gob 
1. 


Tolerance is the characteristic virtue of the modern era, just 
as intolerance has been typical of every age and almost every 
people in days gone by. Tolerance, we feel is the golden key 
which alone can open the door to the golden age. Tolerance is 
the one thing that can possibly wipe out the evils of hatred, 
warfare, and confusion, the age-old enemies of the progress of 
the race. When men and women learn tolerance for each other’s 
race, nationality, religion, and general attitudes, then they will 
be able to understand one another, and eventually to work with 
one another, even to love one another. Without that tolerance, 
we can never understand people of different race or religion or 
nationality, because we never even stop to look at them fairly 
and honestly. Certainly, without tolerance, co-operation, human 
sympathy, the brotherhood of man are empty words without 
possibility of realization. 

But that only pushes the problem back a step. What is this 
tolerance, and how ean it be attained? It is easy for us to be 
tolerant on matters we do not care about, but hard on matters 
that are deep in our hearts. Religious tolerance is growing be- 
cause religious intensity of the old type is weakening. Religi- 
ous wars, as practised in Europe three hundred years ago, will 
never be repeated because Christians are no longer certain that 
their fellow-Christians of different sects are going to burn in 
everlasting flames. Thomas Jefferson was tolerant on religion 
because he was fairly indifferent to the whole subject; his in- 
tolerance was reserved for political opponents, and for the aris- 
tocratic party in other lands as well. The rarest object in the 
whole museum of history is the man who has profound convie- 
tions of his own, and yet is tolerant of those who differ from 
him—a Roger Williams, for example, who was a pious clergy- 
man but allowed liberty of conscience in his settlement of Rhode 

45 


46 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


Island even to Catholics and Jews. Such a man is a symbol of 
what the whole world may become in the messianic age, a type 
of our strictly modern ideal. 


2. 


The study of intolerance takes us at once out of the field of 
individual psychology into the newer and less cultivated field 
of social psychology, the mind of the group. For intolerance is 
characteristically an attribute of groups. Intolerance is the white 
against the black; the Christian against the Jew, the French- 
man against the German—always one group lined up against 
another. Intolerance nestles in the individual mind simply be- 
cause every individual of us is a member of a nation, a religion, 
a race, and has the typical prejudices of his own people. I may 
think myself better than you, but that is merely egotism. If I 
think my family better than your family and refuse to associate 
with you, that becomes intolerance. And if I join an organiza- 
tion of people with similar opinions to my own, and we decide 
to keep you and all your kind from doing business or holding 
public office or otherwise prospering and succeeding in a coun- 
try which we both inhabit, then intolerance has attained its 
growth and come to flower. Always one body of people against 
another, animated by prejudice, and the reasons do not mat- 
ter. For prejudice, literally, means prejudgment, opinion be- 
fore the facts come in, and the facts are then selected to give 
us reasons for our attitude. 

First of all, we must realize that intolerance is the typical 
and natural human attitude. From the beginning of history it 
was so deeply intrenched in every race and tribe that it seems 
to have begun with the life of the race, and has.its roots perhaps 
in the pre-human life, among those wolves or bees that drive a 
stranger out of the pack or hive and leave him to die alone. 
For that happened times without number in the early human 
packs of human hives. Every group of people knows that it is 
the one proper, human group, and that all others are imitations 
and second-rate. The foreign language always is gibberish to 
us, not because it is inferior, but simply because we do not un- 
derstand it. The uneducated man always looks on a foreigner 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 47 


as somehow an imbecile, because he cannot understand a simple, 
natural tongue like English! The ancient Greeks spoke of such 
old, magnificent civilizations as those of Egypt and Persia as 
barbarians, even though Greece was their pupil in every art 
from war to letters. The Mohammedan ealls others unbeliev- 
ers, even though they may be fire-worshippers, or Buddhists, or 
Christians; these people are not unbelievers, but merely dif- 
ferent-believers. And the Christian calls the Mohammedan, in 
turn, infidel, which means the same thing. In the Merchant of 
Venice, the Jew is referred to as a pagan, which is exactly the 
thing which the Jew is not historically, for Christianity repre- 
sents a combination of Jewish and pagan elements. No matter— 
everyone thinks that his people are right and other peoples 
wrong. ‘‘My country, right or wrong,’’ represents a conces- 
sion to modernism, blatant as it is. The universal feeling has 
always been, up to the threshold of our own age, ‘‘My own coun- 
try, or tribe, or people, is always right.’’ 

Intolerance, then, is not based on reasons, whether good or 
bad. ; It grows out of the nature of groups-of people. It means 
merely that the other fellow is different, not at all that he is 
wrong. Everett Dean Martin points out in his studies of the 
crowd that the crowd is always dogmatic and egocentric. Every 
nation has some crowd characteristics, is interested in its own 
welfare, not in that of its colonies, or its competitors, or the 
human race. Patriotism is as dogmatic as is religion. Every 
state, every city has its local loyalty, which magnifies its advan- 
tages and conceals its disadvantages, and especially cries down 
its rival state or city. Even the scientist, the student of social 
conditions, is apt to speak of higher and lower cultures, or 
higher and lower races—meaning always that his culture is 
higher and the Chinese lower, or the Anglo-Saxon is higher and 
the Italian lower. At that point the scientist seems to be ani- 
mated by a very unscientific intolerance. When a student of 
society points out ways in which the Chinese culture is worthy 
of our imitation, then I will feel that he is truly scientifie and 
not at all prejudiced. For who says that our occidental culture 
is superior to the Chinese? We say so. Who says the Chinese 
is superior? The Chinese do, of course. But they are prej- 


48 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


udiced? Certainly, and so are we! The most that can be said 
with certainty is that the two cultures are different, and these 
differences can then be studied in detail. 

Prejudice is often racial because people of different appear- 
ances stand out clearly as very different from us indeed.  But™ 
they need not be inferior. The current prejudice against the 
Negro says that he is lazy, unintelligent, immoral—but the same 
intolerance operates against the many members of the colored 
race who are more diligent, more intelligent, and quite as moral 
as the average white. In all these characteristics the races over- 
lap; the most that can be said statistically is that the whites 
have the larger percentage of the higher intellectual persons. Un- 
fortunately, much of that may be due to training rather than 
to heredity, for in the army tests the northern negroes actually 
averaged higher than the southern whites. But even if this in- 
tolerance toward the black race were justified by facts after 
we whites entertained it on natural instinctive grounds, why 
then should we give directly opposite reasons for our dislike of 
the Japanese? For the Japanese is called by his very enemies 
shrewd, industrious and saving. If the lazy negro is our in- 
ferior, then the hustling Japanese should be our superior. The 
fact is that neither race is inferior in a way that can be proved— 
but both are different, and every group is naturally intolerant 
of the group that is different from itself. 

But weighty reasons of racial character are quite .unneces- 
sary in establishing prejudice. Probably no two peoples in Eu- 
rope are more closely related in race than the Germans and the 
English. A hundred years ago or more they were closest allies 
against Napoleon; during the World War, when political and 
economic conditions ranged them on opposite sides, each tried 
to show that it was a superior race, with no connection at all 
with the other, so far beneath it. Religious prejudice may be 
based on genuine differences, as between Jew and Christian, or 
on comparatively trivial matters as between Methodists and 
Baptists. The shifting nature of these prejudices and their 
purely personal application appears distinctly in the latest 
slogan of intolerancee—‘‘ White, Protestant, Gentile, American.’’ 
All others, not conforming to this criterion, cannot be one hun- 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 49 


dred per centers. This excludes the Negro, as well as the In- 
dian, who is certainly American but is not white. It eliminates 
the Jew, who is not a gentile; and the Catholic who is not a 
Protestant. And it excludes a white Protestant gentile of Eng- 
lish or German birth, who may be everything else but is not 
American-born. Obviously, there is no logic in this, for classes 
are excluded for exactly opposite reasons. There is nothing in 
it except the one fact which always animates every kind of in- 
tolerance—the fact of difference. 

Walter Lippman in his ‘‘Public Opinion’’ presents a point 
which no discussion of prejudice can ignore—*‘that the way 
we see things is a combination of what is there and of what we 
expected to find.’? He works out the process of the ‘‘mental 
stereotype,’’ by which we have a preconception of the labor agi- 
tator, the alien, the Harvard man, and see the individual always 
in the light of the group to which we may attribute him. *‘One 
factor, the insertion between man and his environment of a 
pseudo-environment. To that pseudo-environment his behavior 
is a response.’’ *‘The pictures inside people’s heads do not 
automatically correspond with the world outside.’’ 


*On some natures, stimuli from the outside, especially when they are 
printed or spoken words, evoke some part of a system of stereotypes, so 
that the actual sensation and the preconception occupy consciousness at the 
same time. The two are blended, much as if we looked at red through 
blue glasses and saw green. . . . If the experience contradicts the 
stereotype, one of two things happens. If the man is no longer plastic, 
or if some powerful interest makes it highly inconvenient to rearrange his 
stereotypes, he pooh-poohs the contradiction as an exception that proves 
the rule, discredits the witness, finds a flaw somewhere, and manages to 
forget it. But if he still is curious and openminded, the novelty is taken 
into the picture and allowed to modify it. 


Thus acquaintance of one group with another is not enough in 
itself to break down prejudice, for the white man may see the 
Negro, or the Christian the Jew, not as the other really is but 
as he thinks the other group ought to be. Only escape from 
group thinking, the use of the individual intelligence about an 


- Hippmanys).-) done Der Olee Ds Ole as DI99, 


50 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


individual, ean possibly make any difference in our pre-con- 
ceived notions of other peoples. 

Moreover it is true, as Professor Shailer of Harvard pointed 
~ out long ago in his book, ‘‘The Neighbor,’’ that this fact of dif- 
ference operates most strongly when the two different groups 
come into contact with each other. Prejudice is always strongest 
on the frontier. The Nebraskan does not have the active preju- 
dice against Mexico that animates the Texan, nor against Japan 
that we find in California, nor against the Negro as in the solid 
south. Not that Nebraska is a land favored peculiarly by jus- 
tice, but that it has no direct contact with large numbers of 
these different races. Naturally, this contact often opens the 
way to real acquaintance, before which intolerance grows faint 
and may even vanish. American soldiers in the occupied dis- 
tricts of Germany brought enough German brides to show how 
quickly prejudice breaks down on personal acquaintance. Chris- 
tian scholars of the time of Humanism learned Hebrew from 
Jews whom their medieval predecessors would have avoided as 
the plague, and a new respect for Judaism began to spread. But 
as long as the contact of the two peoples is a frontier contact 
only, a group contact, of class with class, directed by their dif- 
ferent status in the world, such contact merely ministers to the 
intolerance which individual knowledge and friendship would 
break down. 

A striking instance of this.group nature of intolerance oc- 
curred within my own observation on the Western front dur- 
ing the World War. In an attack one of our prisoners was a 
German lad of eighteen, a harmless peasant boy who had de- 
serted his machine gun and come in willingly as a prisoner; we 
made him useful about the first aid post, and he carried water, 
swept out the place, and even wrapped up German helmets to 
send to America as souvenirs. But Hans had been a machine 
gunner; if our soldiers had found him at his post they might 
have shot him on sight. If they had found him with other 
troops, they would have disarmed him, driven him back to the 
prison camp. In the first case, he would have belonged to the 
group of machine gunners, the greatest danger to the American 
advance. In the second, he would have belonged to the group 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 5]. 


of German soldiers, and been fair prey for enmity and cap- 
ture. As it was, he was regarded merely as Hans—and the 
hated German machine gunner acted as servant to the friendly 
American bosses. 

If these general principles of intolerance are true, we can 
apply them at once to the peculiar situation of the Jew—every- 
where at home, yet everywhere the creature of prejudice; not so 
very different from the other white nations among whom he 
lives, yet always distinct from them and always the target of in- 
tolerance. Every movement of bigotry, aristocracy, militarism, 
junkerism in every land makes anti-semitism one of its cardinal 
shouting-cries, from the emigrés of Russia to the royalist anti- 
Dreyfusards of France. The Jew is hated everywhere simply 
because he lives everywhere, and is everywhere a little different 
from other people. The Jew has a distinct religion, a peculiar 
tradition and appearance which can sometimes be distinguished 
—he is different from other people. And the extreme bitter- 
ness of this anti-Semitism, more than of any other anti-party 
the world over, is simply because everywhere the Jew lives on a 
frontier, in direct group contact with the intolerant of other 
peoples. Every Jew lives on a Franco-German frontier, or a 
Mexican-American one. Even in the United States of Amer- 
ica, with its proud tradition of tolerance written into the Fed- 
eral Constitution, there is now a movement of anti-Semitism. 
The most obvious condition of its rise is the increase of the Jew- | 
ish community of America, that is, the extension of the frontier / 
line, the contact of more Americans with this ‘‘alien,’’? which 
means different, people. Add to that the hatred of certain — 
foreign groups aroused during the war, the suspicion of certain 
radical groups directly after it, the general unsettled condition 
of world opinion, and the vast increase of European anti- | 
Semitism as the parties of reaction were thrown on the defensive | 
—and the exact form of American anti-Semitism begins to show | 
itself. 

But all these local details do not obscure the real nature.of 
this prejudice which we face in America today. It is just an- 
other form of the intolerance of everything different which 
the wandering exiles have had to face during their two thousand 


52 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


years of homeless persecution. Of course, all this has had its 
effect on the Jew. It has driven the Jew into intolerance in his 
turn. His intolerance has never expressed itself in terms of 
“persecution or violence, very seldom in terms of hatred. The 
intolerance of the Jew became, in self-defense, a pride in the 
Chosen People of God, in his ancient lineage, in his family 
loyalty, in his glorious tradition. He then emphasized the fact 
of difference from other peoples, just as they did, and the Jew 
looked down on the rude, ignorant heathens just as the Christian 
despised the uncouth alien Jew. Intolerance has one virtue— 
it makes for loyalty to your own. It has many vices, beginning 
with false and ignorant pride, culminating in bitter, malignant 
hatred. 


4, 


If intolerance is this natural, universal force, what then is 
tolerance? How ean tolerance ever hope to succeed in a world 
divided into so many hostile and suspicious groups? Tolerance 
means the exercise of the individual intelligence. It means that 
a man has dared to look at the facts and to say: ‘‘My people is 
wrong. This foreigner is just as good as I am.’’ Or this Jew, 
or Catholic, or negro, as the case may be. It means that a man 
has the courage to defy the public opinion of his own group, 
and to use his own brains instead of going along with the crowd. 
It means that general principles of right and wrong, applicable 
universally, have begun to replace the old tribal morality, of 
sticking by your own through thick and thin. It represents the 
erowth of free inquiry, of science, of the unbiased use of the — 
human intellect, the broadening of the human sympathies. It 
represents also the breaking down of group control, that instant — 
and unthinking emotional response of the crowd to that which 
is congenial or against that which is different. Tolerance is the 
typical virtue of the modern world because the modern world 
is becoming increasingly self-conscious, intelligent and individ- 
ualistic, and especially because the modern world is beginning 
to afford opportunities for real acquaintance between members 
of different peoples, not merely the superficial frontier contacts 
which make for prejudice. Above all, tolerance marks the 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 53 


growth of the larger, more inclusive group which includes the 
smaller ones, and outlaws intolerance between them. In the 
American army during the World War intolerance was at its 
lowest, simply because all the various elements in our people 
were acutely conscious of their common country. Old-time prej- 
udices, left over from the Civil War, were forgotten. Religious 
and racial intolerance were minimized because there was a com- 
mon purpose, and a common intolerance of a common enemy. 

The coming of tolerance between any two groups, then, means 
that these two have been included, in the minds of their own 
members, aS parts of a larger, more inclusive body to which 
they both owe loyalty. Such a tolerance between the nations 
of the world, now so ready to make war at the slightest provoca- 
tion, would imply an international or a supernational loyalty, a 
genuine brotherhood of man, and a real fatherhood of God. 
Tolerance means that intelligence has made inroads into the old 
habit of following the group custom blindly through thick and 
thin. It means that sympathy has succeeded hatred, that suspi- 
cion has given way to brotherhood and love. Tolerance is the 
supreme challenge to the authority of the group to master the 
thinking man. Treachery to one’s own nation or faith is no such 
challenge, for that simply means that the traitor preferred 
another rule and another standard to the one in which he was 
born. But tolerance is the challenge; it serves notice that no 
absolute authority, no ancient usage of hatred or bigotry, no 
instinet to fear the stranger, can forever dominate. 

There is a fine summary of this whole question in ‘‘The Group 
Mind”’ by Professor William MacDougall of Harvard. Dr. 
MacDougall says of the modern world: ?® 


Instead of maintaining universal intolerance, we have made great strides 
toward universal tolerance. . . . The religious tolerance and liberty of the 
modern era are features of the general increase of tolerance and liberty, 
and must be ascribed to the same causes as this wider fact. For long ages 
men have felt sympathy and given considerate and just treatment to those 
who have been nearest to them; at first, to the members of their own 
immediate family; later to the fellow-members of their own small society; 
and then, as societies expanded into complex caste societies, to the members 


5 Chapter 20. 


54 | Anti-Semitism in the United States 


of their own caste; later, as castes were broken down, to all their fellow 
citizens; and later still in some degree to all men. 


And he concludes the examination of the subject by saying: 


The coming of religious toleration was due to the application of the spirit 
of inquiry to religious systems; these inquiries produced irreconcilable 
sects, whose strife prepared the way for compromise and toleration. 


D. 


One more question arises naturally in our minds before we 
can accept this analysis and use it as part of our daily think- 
ing and acting; what is the effect of such toleration on our own 
loyalty to our own people? Does the philanthropist neglect his 
family, or the man without strong religious hatreds prove care- 
less of his religion, or the lover of mankind prove a poor patriot? 
This is the usual opinion, and therefore a very effective 
argument against the position which I have here tried to es- 
tablish. But this opinion is directly contrary to the facts of 
the case. Does family affection make for or against love of 
country? Naturally, the former, for loyal children are also 
loyal citizens. Should the man who would love his country on 
that account hate his city or his state? Of course not; love of 
his native land begins with the smaller unit, which he knows 
best, and then grows to the entire nation, which includes it. 
And in the same way loyalty to the cause of humanity need not 
mean, cannot mean disloyalty to the cause of the nation, which 
is so great and important a part of the human race. But, on 
the other hand, the patriotic American does not hate Illinois be- 
cause he has moved to Indiana. Love of one’s own state per- 
sists without the hatred and intolerance of the other state, just 
because the two are members of the American nation, and the 
inclusive loyalty makes the other loyalties less bitter and less 
contentious against each other. Why, in the Balkans, states 
much smaller than Indiana and Illinois have their armies al- 
ways ready for a cause of complaint against the other. That is 
because they have as yet no common loyalty. It is because the 
free intelligence has not yet broken through the inborn suspi- 
cion and intolerance of the human pack. Probably we can never 
expect all human beings actually and actively to love one an- 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 5p 


other. That seems illusory in light of the history of human 
nature. But there is every prospect that tolerance will spread 
as world intelligence becomes more enlightened, and as more 
people in each generation share in that world intelligence. And 
this spread of tolerance will make always for larger and more 
ideal loyalties, including the warring nations and hating sects 
of today, even as nowadays the city includes the family or the 
nation includes the state. Hatred toward the Jew takes its place 
today in the hierarchy of hatreds as one of the strongest and 
most widespread of all. Therefore it will probably be one of 
the last to go as tolerance overcomes intolerance the world over. 
But every step toward the discovery of new truths or toward the 
dissemination of the truths already known is another step to- 
ward the destruction of all prejudice and toward the real libe- 
ration of the Jew. Naturally, the Jew himself will overcome his 
prejudices at the same time, as he has shown himself pathetically 
eager to do at several times of false security in the past. 

The great hopeful fact of it all is this: tolerance begets. tol-- 
erance. That hatred causes hatred is well known, for it is the 
normal course of every personal conflict or national war. Each 
unfriendly act of one side is followed by one of the other, until 
nations enter warfare all ready to hate one another, and leave 
it hating more than ever. But friendship, fairness, tolerance, 
have the same way of spreading by their own inner force. If 
America discriminates against Japanese immigrants, the Japa- 
nese think of ways to show their dislike of America. But if 
America gives back the Boxer indemnity to China, the Chinese: 
send their students to America, then these return to their native 
land with an attitude of friendliness, and the process of tolerance 
and peace, once begun, grows by its own power. Lines of tol- 
erance radiate from every true center of justice, of inquiry, of 
religion. Human growth is slow, but we can mark its methods. 
and take part in its tremendous process. 


CHAPTER IV. 


AMERICAN HISTORY— 
A DEVELOPMENT OF GROUPS 


All history may reasonably be regarded as a process of group 
minds in conflict and association, struggle and integration. 
Probably this method of study will bring out more genuine 
facts and a more fundamental order of causation than political 
or military or economic history alone; at the least, it presents 
one significant and important mode of studying human associ- 
ation in both the past and present. From this point of view, 
Greece was a congeries of competitive city states, which united 
only against an outside foe; Israel was the union of twelve dif- 
ferent tribes, together with the Canaanites whom they subdued; 
Rome was a product of the various organizations, the patricians 
and plebeians; England the growth into each other of the suc- 
cessive waves of conquest—Celts, Romans, Saxons, Normans— 
and the more recent peaceful immigrants. From this point of 
view, the United States is conspicuous among all nations for the 
number and variety of its groups and for their union (on the 
whole) by a federal principle of agreement, rather than a forci- 
ble levelling and unification from without. And this process of 
group synthesis is not a modern one only, as it is sometimes er- 
roneously considered ; it is characteristic of the piece-meal, hap- 
hazard colonization from the very outset; it pervaded the Revo- 
lutionary army, and was the outstanding fact that confronted 
the framers of the Federal Constitution in 1787. 


Li 


EK. B. Greene sums up the reasons for adopting the Constitu- 
tion in this way: 


*The movement for a more effective union was partly the work of far- 
sighted leaders who could look beyond state boundaries to the larger inter- 


1Greene: Foundations of American Nationality, p. 579. 


56 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 57 


ests of the country as a whole . . . another group were beginning to see 
that the weakness of Congress might have something to do with troubles 
nearer home. 


Thus the causes of the Federal union were the need of external 
defense and the need of reconciling the many diverse groups in 
the population of the new nation. These groups are summarized 
by Carl R. Fish: | 

* There were thirteen distinct and separate state governments, and Ver- 
mont had its own local authority which defied the rest. . . . Differences 
in the original stock, emphasized by different physical conditions and by 
the isolated life of the colonial period, had created several great sections or 
divisions in the country, which had sufficient similarity within themselves 
and sufficient unlikeness to each other, to make them permanent entities, 
and to cause sectionalism to be a permanent factor in American history. 


He then goes on to enumerate the groups: New England, with 
its Puritan English ancestry and its agriculture and fishing; 
the South, with its English Episcopalians, its aristocratic ideals, 
its plantation life; the piedmont country, with its independent 
small farmers and self-governing townships; and in between the 
commercial valleys of the Hudson, the Delaware and the Sus- 
quehanna. These again had their local differences of charac- 
ter: 

*The Hudson had been settled by the Dutch, although many English, 
New Englanders, Germans and others had mixed with them. The Delaware 
region was largely occupied by English and German Quakers. The Susque- 
hanna Valley contained a large proportion of Germans, still using their 
native tongue, and also many Scotch, Irish and English. There existed 
well defined interests, the mercantile, the agricultural; the German, the 
Dutch and the Quakers; the city, the country. 


Beyond all these was the frontier, with its own natural condi- 
tions, type of inhabitants, and economic problems, a democratic 
community separate from all the rest. 

The Constitutional convention of 1787 in Philadelphia was 
typical of this situation. Every problem found divergent inter- 
ests and opinions; every solution was effected by compromise. 
*There was state jealousy of all central authority; the opposi- 

2Fish: The Development of American Nationality, p. 2-15. 


3 Fish, p. 10. 
4 Greene, pp. 590-598. 


58 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


tion between large and small states; that between the industries 
of the north and the agriculture of the south; the slave trade, 
with its complex of moral and economic problems; the section- 
alism of the settled east and the frontier west; the protection of 
the property-holding class and the satisfaction of the radicals 
with their demand for liberty and equality. Every one of these 
conflicts had to be settled if possible, or at least (as with slavery ) 
brought to a temporary status to avoid sharp struggle. There 
were, of course, certain unifying factors. The majority of the 
settlers were English, and most of these Protestants. The non- 
English speaking elements were very largely of Teutonic blood 
and Protestant religion also. There was a common political ex- 
perience, and a democratic urge typical of the frontier. Most 
important of all, there was an eight-year war fought together 
against a common enemy and under the same Commander-in- 
Chief. The American government, then, with its new Consti- 
tution, was not a simple unity from the outset. It was rather 
a highly complex unity, containing within itself many minor 
groups, many different viewpoints, and many integrations of 
the sub-group for the benefit of the nation as a whole. 


2. 


An interesting illustration of this, and for our purpose a 
erucial one, is in the religious life of the thirteen original states. 
Before the Revolution, the states might be divided into four 
groups as regards their religious organization: there were con- 
gregational establishments in Massachusetts and Plymouth, 
New Haven, Connecticut, and New Hampshire; Church of Eng- 
land establishments in Virginia and the two Carolinas; four 
states formerly under various régimes had had the Church of 
England forced on them—Maryland, at first under Catholic 
rule, but with freedom of residence for all Christians; New York 
and New Jersey, which had been dominated by the Dutch Re- 
formed Church; and Georgia, founded with almost complete 
religious liberty. Only three states had no established chureh— 
Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and its offshoot, Delaware. Of 
these last, Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams in 
1636, under the radical, not to say revolutionery principle of 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 59 


complete separation of church and state, with right of residence 
and citizenship for all persons, even including Jews and atheists. 
Pennsylvania, chartered in 1681, was founded by William Penn, 
the Quaker, with liberty of residence for all ‘‘believers in Al- 
mighty God’’; but the English government insisted on the con- 
dition that all voters and office holders ‘‘shall be such as profess 
faith in Jesus Christ’’ and the Protestant religion. What the 
new nation had, then, was not religious liberty, but rather a 
clash of many different points of view. 


° Massachusetts set up its theocratic state with its chief interest in the 
Church; Virginia established its civil state, with the church as a subject 
member; while Rhode Island boldly denied the purposes and premises of 
both, placing an impassable gulf between the State and the Church and 
relegating to the individual conscience and to voluntary association all 
concern and action touching the Church and religious matters. 


What, then, should be the upshot of this confusion of religious 
groups, with their ancient hatreds and prejudices, ingrown with 
history and overlaid with former strife and martyrdom? It was 
obviously impossible to make the United States Calvinist or 
Episcopal; it was necessary to have some sacrifice of each for 
the good of all. But it might have been possible to make the 
nation Protestant Christian, as was actually the case with the 
state of New Hampshire until 1877. Various minor causes here 
entered in. Warfare with England meant some opposition, at 
least, to the Church of England. The distance from the actual 
seat of old-world struggles, the character of the colonists and 
their longing for every type of freedom, helped much. The new 
theories of the French Encyclopedists, as adopted by Jefferson, 
certainly had great influence. But most important of all was 
the existence of the many minor sects, with the few important 
ones, of which all longed to rule but none wished to be dominated 
by any other. 

The upshot was religious freedom, the separation of church 
and state, according to Article VI, Section 3, of the Federal 
Constitution: ‘‘No religious test shall ever be required as a 
qualification to any office or public trust under the United 


5Cobb: Rise of Religious Liberty in America, p. 70. 


60 Anti-Semitism im the Umted States 


States.’’ This clause was opposed on both sides—by Massachu- 
setts as being too liberal, by Virginia and Rhode Island as not 
liberal enough. Virginia had two years before this overthrown 
her state church and given complete freedom of conscience— 
not toleration—to all her people. The opposition even to tolera- 
tion was becoming erystallized in the words of Thomas Paine: 
‘‘Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance, but the counterfeit 
of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right 
of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.’’ 
So the first amendment to the Constitution, adopted immediately 
afterward by motion of the first Congress, and by the required 
two-thirds of the states, was: ‘‘Congress shall make no law 
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free 
exercise thereof.’’ 

This was tremendously significant of the growing and newly 
conscious group mind of the United States of America. It was 
equally important for the future of the nation and its unity 
in days to come. Religious liberty was not a matter of doctrine 
in its inception; it was the product of the birth and development 
of the group mind of the nation. It meant the relinquishment 
of the racial habits, of the state laws, of the old urge to persecute 
(common to almost every group, even those who were themselves 
refugees from persecution), and the adoption of a national 
standard to which every state, every church and every sect 
should bring its sacrifice. And if this sacrifice was not of their 
own right to live, but only of the right to make others miserable, 
it was nevertheless the sacrifice of something so important that 
the demand had econvulsed France, Germany and England not 
many years before. Religious liberty, indeed, however firmly 
based on law and political ideals, never became the habit of 
thought and action which intolerance had been. A recurrent 
phenomenon of American life has been the breaking up into 
religious, racial and sectional groups, with a further synthesis 
of Americanization, through some common interest to unite 
them. The conflict among the many groups prior to the adop- 
tion of the Constitution, and its solution in that document with 
its Bill of Rights, has been paralleled at least four times from 
that period to the present day. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 61 


3. 


These four reactions against the immigrant correspond with 
the four peaks of the curve of immigration into the United 
States, with two great alterations in the process, corresponding 
to the Civil War and the World War. 

Up till 1830, immigration into the United States was small 
in amount and fairly regular. The first wave stretched from 
1831 to 1861, reaching its peak in 1855; its total amounted to 
four millions of foreigners, of whom the largest group and the 
first to come were the Irish, the second in number and date 
of arrival the Germans. The growth of intolerance against these 
newcomers was shown in the movement known as Know-Nothing- 
ism or the American Party. The second wave, of similar nation- 
alities, was from 1862 to 1877; the reply to this appeared in the 
anti-alien planks in the political platforms of 1876: The third 
wave, from 1878 to 1897, was larger than these earlier ones; it 
included many Scandinavians and, after 1882, growing numbers 
of Italians, Russians, and Austro-Hungarians, the two last being 
composed in part of persecuted Jews, in part of impoverished 
peasants. The Nativist reaction against this immigrant trend 
appears rather in the form of religious opposition, for the 
American Protective Association of those days was predomin- 
antly anti-Catholic. The fourth wave began in 1898 and ex- 
tended until 1914, when the outbreak of the World War in 
Europe caused a sudden drop to almost nothing; in its highest 
years, 1907 and 1913, more than 1,200,000 entered our ports an- 
nually; and the greatest number of these new arrivals came 
from Italy, Austria-Hungary and Russia. The reaction against 
these new immigrants was under way, but the war interrupted 
its progress, and the Ku Klux Klan arrived at its full power 
only after the war, when new conditions swayed the group mind 
of America. 

In each of these cases, the height of the movement against the 
immigrant came just after the peak of the wave of immigration, 
at the time when it had had time to impress itself on the native- 
born. The philosophies of these four movements varied accord- 
ing to the nationality of the immigrants against whom the 


62 Anti-Semitism in the Umted States 


natives were protesting, and according to the general philosophy 
of life in vogue at the time. The first such movement, the Know- 
Nothing or American Party, originated in New York State in 
1852 ‘‘as a secret organization with passwords, oath, grip and 
ritual.’’® Its creed was summed up in two words: Americanism 
and Protestantism. Its special target was the two million Irish 
who had come into the country; they were poor laborers, with 
a low standard of living, ignorant, hereditary enemies of Eng- 
land, and Catholics into the bargain. No wonder there were 
anti-Irish riots in New York, Philadelphia and Boston; that 
it was rumored the Pope would soon be dictator of America; 
or that the secret anti-alien society was begun. But the course 
of the movement was spectacular and brief. It entered national 
politics, thus both making bitter enemies for itself and taking 
off the secrecy which was its chief source of power. Then came 
the abolitionist movement, and the American party was split 
into northern and southern branches. Most important of all, 
the peak of immigration was passed, the Irish adopted the 
American standard of living, became a part of communal life, 
without any danger of Catholic overthrow of our cherished insti- 
tutions—Othello’s occupation was gone, and the Know-Nothing 
party disappeared. 

The next wave of immigration and the next reaction against 
it were minor ones. The immigrants met groups of their own 
origin already absorbed into the common life of America, and 
fitted in with little difficulty. The attempt in 1876 to prevent 
the use of public funds for sectarian schools was itself com- 
paratively slight. 

But in between came the tremendous crisis of the Civil War. 
Here the opposition was not between native and immigrant, 
but between north and south, an industrial society of free labor- 
ers against an agricultural society of castes,—planters, poor 
whites, and negro slaves. I shall not go further into this con- 
flict, because it is too familiar and has comparatively little to 
do with the particular application of my viewpoint. But, from 
our point of view, it is important to see the place of the first 


®Mecklin: The Ku Klux Klan, p. 183. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 63 


Ku Klux Klan of 1865-71. This was again a secret organization, 
adding the feature of disguise, for the terrifying effect on the 
negroes whom it was the object of the Klan to overawe. The 
Klan was a partisan and sectional organization, of Southern 
white men of Confederate sympathies, to maintain their group 
supremacy over the newly freed negroes and the ‘‘carpet 
baggers’’ from the North. The victors had, as usual, indulged 
in oppression over the losers, and the grievance was a very real 
one. The Klan was partially successful in its object, but at once 
fell into numerous abuses, was used by partisans to vent personal 
grudges, fell into the hands of a lawless element, and was 
formally disbanded in 1871 by General Nathan B. Forrest, its 
national commander or Grand Wizard. Its slogan of ‘‘white 
supremacy ’’ shows its animus against the negroes and the North, 
not against the alien. Some of its partisans claim that the Klan 
did not disband when it was formally ordered so to do, but 
persisted in its underground activity until as late as 1877.° 
However that may be, its character and purpose are very clear; 
it was sectional, timely, and for the one aim of white supremacy. 
It appealed to its members and frightened its enemies by its 
methods of disguise and secrecy, no less than by the beatings, 
burnings and other outrages which were carried on either under 
its auspices or by the false use of its insignia and methods. Its 
defiance of the law imposed by force, and its use of force in 
reply, are the vestiges of war psychology. It was the legitimate, 
if unlovely, offspring of the Reconstruction. It had no function 
left when the white South regained control of the states, but 
its memory still lingers as part of the idealization of the ‘‘lost 
eause’’ of the Confederacy. 

The third reaction against immigration was primarily anti- 
Catholic in trend. This was the A. P. A., or American Protec- 
tive Association, another secret society, organized in 1887, which 
reached its greatest popularity in 1894 and 1895. At this same 
period there were several other societies with the same purpose, 
notably the National League for the Protection of American In- 
stitutions, which had a number of extremely prominent men 


TSusan L. Davis: Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan. 


64 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


among its members. At this time the so-called ‘‘new immigra- 
tion’’ was growing strong, with its large numbers of Italian and 
Austrian Catholics, added to those of German and Irish origin 
already on the ground. The old fear of political domination 
by the Papacy, expressed at the time of the adoption of the first 
amendment to the Constitution, and then refuted, was again 
revived. There was an orgy of purported ‘‘confessions’’ of 
nuns and priests; there was cireulated a forged oath of the 
Knights of Columbus, in which the members agreed to place the 
papal authority above their national allegiance; and a false 
encyclical of Pope Leo XIII. Thousands of patriotic Americans 
believed all this obvious nonsense, stirred up by the fear of a 
dominant Chureh; the A. P. A. had as many as two million 
members and threatened to drive out of public life the twelve 
million Catholics then in the country, without regard to their 
race, nation, service to America, or the number of generations 
they had lived in the United States. The mob spirit, once 
aroused, crystalized in the breaking of the Northern group mind 
of Civil War days into various sub-groups, Catholic, anti-Catho- 
lic and indifferent. But the financial panic of the 1890’s re- 
sulted in a sudden drop in immigration; the older settlers 
learned English and were absorbed into the American cultural 
group; the A. P. A. had no reason for existence, and again 
substantial unity was achieved by the mind of the American 
people. 

In this connection we must give a passing glance to what is 
still our single greatest problem of groups, the existence of a ten 
per cent. negro minority in the United States. These people 
were brought here by force as slaves; as a subject class they 
were refused education, though at the same time their own 
language, religion and customs were thrown into disrepute and 
have been largely forgotten. Though freed from economic 
slavery, they are still politically a subject class in our southern 
states, while in northern and border states they are gaining a 
political balance of power. Finally, they rest everywhere under 
social disabilities, from the ‘‘Jim Crow’’ cars of the South to 
the subtler distaste and ostracisms of the North. The result is 
that they are forming complete, self-contained Negro com- 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 65 


munities within the larger cities of the North and South alike; 
that they are growing increasingly self-conscious aS a group; 
and that the large number of mulattoes, who in the British and 
French West Indies would rank as a third group, between the 
racial divisions, are here forced to make common cause with 
negroes. The negroes are thus a self-conscious group, though 
their culture is imitative. The grouping of the negroes apart is 
easy, on the whole, because of the gross external signs, such as 
skin color and texture of hair, so that the mass of the whites of 
the United States regard them definitely as a different and a 
lower race. That anthropologists are not so certain of all this 
makes little difference, because the group mind is based rather 
on old habits of thought than on the understanding of new and 
difficult facts. Here seems a problem of a different order, then, 
than the racial and religious groupings of the sub-varieties of 
the white race, which are constantly being overcome and re- 
grouped in a larger union of social life. In this study it will 
be impossible to do more than point out the existence of this 
distinct problem, with its similar mental background to the rest 
but its immeasurably more terrible implications. 

The fourth wave of immigration was by far the greatest in 
number of newcomers, and by far the most variegated in racial 
and national composition. It brought a million a year or more 
for six years during this period. And its members had 75% 
of persons from southern and eastern Europe, while the immigra- 
tion prior to 1890 had included only 20% of these races, and 
had been chiefly the English, Irish, Germans and Seandinavians. 
It is no wonder that the race theory began to be popular in 
America, under the spectacular leadership of Lothrop Stoddard 
and Grant Madison, and that many began to agitate for a 
greater or less limitation of the flood of immigration. Even so 
sober a student of society as Professor Edward A. Ross of 
Wisconsin held that it was wise to assimilate people of different 
group mind more slowly than we were doing at the time. He 
said : 

*There have come among us in the last half century more than twenty 
million European immigrants with all manner of mental background, many 


* Ross: Overland Monthly, Feb. 1922. 


66 Anti-Semitism im the United States 


of them having tradition which will no more blend with American traditions 
than oil will blend with water. 


And he proceeded to point out their inexperience with dem- 
ocratic institutions, their lack of respect for law and for 
women, their disbelief in progress. In addition, we need only 
note that many of these people were Catholics and Jews; the 
total number of the former in the United States in 1923 being 
estimated at 18,000,000 and of the latter at 3,600,000. And the 
Jews were far more conspicuous than their numbers, on account 
of their massing in the great cities and their concentration in 
certain lines of industry. Thus the ground was fully prepared 
for a new anti-alien movement, expressing itself this time in 
the form of efforts to restrict immigration. This movement 
was under way in 1914, and would probably have followed in 
the course of its precursors. But world-shaking events ensued 
which altered the course of groups in America as well. The 
outbreak of the World War in 1914, the entrance of the United 
States into the war in 1917, altered all groups, profoundly 
affected the American group mind, and made the relation be- 
tween the sub-groups and the mind of America very different 
from what it had been. The results of this process are still 
evident, and it is among them that we can look for anti-Semitism, 
together with many other types of intolerance and group op- 
position. 


CHAPTER V. 


THE WORLD WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH 
Li 


With the outbreak of the World War in August 1914, the 
mind of America suddenly became strikingly distinct from that 
of Europe. They were fighting; we were watching. President 
Wilson appealed to the United States to be ‘‘neutral in fact as 
in name... . impartial in thought as well as in action.’’ The 
older American stock sympathized, on the whole, with England, 
except for the Irish and Germans; the newer immigrants had 
different racial and national affinities and memories, some hold- 
ing allegiance to their former governments, some, like the op- 
pressed Russian Jews, being especially bitter against their 
former rulers. In this situation, American neutrality was the 
result, not of indifference, but of lack of understanding on the 
part of many groups in our population and of a stalemate be- 
tween the rest. ) 

One definite result certainly was that all these diverse groups 
of new and old immigrants began to feel themselves a unity, an 
American people, They felt their distinction from the warring 
nations overseas, their own interest, their own reaction to the 
complex problems at issue. Meanwhile, however, both parties 
were trying every means to bring the United States into the war 
on their own sides. Germany tried to bring about an embargo on 
munitions sold to the Allies and in default of that, to obstruct 
their shipment by both peaceful and warlike’ means. Great 
Britain, more especially, tried to influence American public 
opinion in favor of the Allies and against Germany. Within, 
there were pacifists and advocates of preparedness, both trying 
to mold opinion. This formation of an American mind, and the 
difficulty of determining its future direction, came to a head in 
the election of 1916, when the German-Americans opposed Presi- 
dent Wilson, and when Hughes was supported by Roosevelt, the 
arch-interventionist. During this period we experienced the 

67 


68 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


first development of what we have since grown to know inti- 
mately as ‘‘propaganda,’’ a deliberate, elaborate technique for 
influencing the mind of the group. 

The declaration of war by the United States in April, 1917, 
unified the American mind in a manner and to a degree that 
were almost inconceivable. Every immigrant group began to 
pass resolutions favoring the government; the foreign language 
newspapers commenced an intensive propaganda for the prosecu- 
tion of the war. Volunteers came from every section of the 
country and every type of origin, as many from the children of 
Germans as from any other group. The draft law was passed 
with apparent general approval; and its enforcement met with 
surprisingly little difficulty. Huge loans were made to the 
Allied governments. Tremendous bond issues were raised by 
the American government, with general approval and the coer- 
cion of any minority objectors. The National Council of De- 
fense, founded in August, 1916, was able in many cases to over- 
come the dominant profit-motive of our society in gaining self- 
sacrificing patriotism of manufacturers and merchants. 

Along with this voluntary and spontaneous unification of the 
group mind, came repression and coercion directed to forcing 
into agreement any unabsorbed minority groups. The Com- 
mittee on Public Information was founded in September, 1917, 
to exert propaganda through the sources of public information, 
to send out favorable news and opinion, and even through censor- 
ship to suppress material considered dangerous to the general 
cause. The censorship exercised by the military forces on war 
bulletins, war correspondents and the personal letters of soldiers, 
was applied less strictly to the general population. The secret 
service, greatly expanded to cope with German spies, began 
hunting out strikers, radicals or any others who—in the minds 
of the detectives or of any other government officials—might 
possibly obstruct the war efforts. Emergency acts gave the 
President unusual power in these and other directions. 

This use of force was characteristic, not only of the govern- 
ment, but of local groups as well. In one place a German 
sympathizer (real or supposed) might be made to kiss the flag; 
in another a strike leader might be lynched. In Milwaukee, 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 69 


where public opinion was sensitive on account of the large 
number of German-Americans, a quota of Liberty Bonds was 
assigned arbitrarily to every person, and he was practically 
forced to purchase them, irrespective of his ability to do so, by 
threats of ostracism, by influence of his creditors, by every sort 
of social pressure,—in order that Milwaukee might rank as a 
real American community and go ‘‘over the top’’ in every 
‘‘drive.’’ The military language applied to these campaigns was 
matched by a growing technique of organization. Professional 
propagandists perfected a method of meetings, songs, card-cata- 
logs, and quotas, by which any cause might be assured of huge 
sums of money. The greater propaganda of our government 
and foreign governments was matched by the little propaganda 
of every subgroup, as long as this was not in conflict with the 
gveneral purpose. 

A striking illustration of this is in the successful drives of 
the various war-work agencies, the Red Cross, American Library 
Association, Young Men’s Christian Association, Jewish Welfare 
Board, Knights of Columbus, and the rest; and especially in 
their enormous joint campaign just after the signing of the 
armistice. Every American felt that this joint campaign, first, 
would help the soldiers and the common cause; and second, in- 
dicated by its inclusiveness the complete unification of America. 
Along with this general unification came the similar process in 
many of the immigrant groups themselves. Professor Miller * 
tells how this was reflected in the Czecho-Slovak group in Amer- 
ica, so that bitter atheists united with Catholic priests on joint 
committees for national freedom in their old home in Europe. 


2. 


This internal unification was accomplished by a high emotional 
tension, a national and personal uncertainty, and a common hate. 
The prejudice against the various immigrant groups, arising 
as a result of the great wave of immigration, was abated for the 
moment; all the little prejudices were summed up in one great 
hatred of the common enemy, Germany. This was reflected in 


1 Miller: Races, Nations, and Classes, p. 44. 


70 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


avoidance of everything German in this country as well; Ger- 
man instruction was withdrawn from many high schools, German 
music from the opera houses, German fried potatoes from the 
restaurants. The term, ‘‘German-American,’’ formerly in good 
repute, now became a byword, and with it every form of 
‘‘hyphen.’’ The demand now was for ‘‘hundred per cent.’’ 
Americanism. 

In the prevailing ignorance of foreign languages and peoples, 
or even if this ignorance had not existed in its full measure, the 
hatred against the Germans was transferred in part to other 
groups as well, even those with most reason to be anti-German 
or anti-Austrian. Foreign language newspapers fell under 
popular suspicion and official censorship much heavier than 
that of the English language periodicals. Some states passed 
laws, later declared unconstitutional, forbidding teaching, 
preaching or public meetings in languages other than English. 
Foreign sounding names attracted suspicion, and were changed 
in large numbers. Altogether, America begun to repeat the 
oppression of subject groups which had caused permanent re- 
sentment and sown the seeds of rebellion in almost every land 
in Europe, to create her own Ireland, Alsace-Lorraine or Poland. 
Americanization became a synonym for compulsory adoption of 
American standards and group habits. 

Americanization had had a long, if somewhat unsatisfactory, 
trial before the war. It was the attempt, at that time, to bring 
American culture to the supposedly uncultured immigrant 
through settlements, night schools, and other cultural agencies. 
The attempt was satisfactory in a comparatively small propor- 
tion of the total immigrant population; and the earnest workers 
blamed this fact on the poorness of their textbooks, the unsuit- 
ability of their buildings, or the weariness of the people after 
a day of arduous labor. Now, all of these were undoubtedly 
true, but a more fundamental cause of the weakness of Ameri- 
canization methods lay in the fact that they were all one-sided ; 
they consisted in attempts to change the immigrant into an 
American, rather than attempts to join many groups together 
into a composite unity. Even the conference on Americaniza- 
tion called by the Secretary of the Interior in 1918 passed 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 71 


friendly and practical resolutions, but still one-sided and con- 
sequently superficial. 

The few individuals who persisted in their individuality, who 
refused to be absorbed in the group purpose, formed no clearly 
marked group of themselves. They were the ‘‘ conscientious 
objectors,’’ who refused any type of activity that might help 
the military machine; the ‘‘slackers,’’ who evaded the draft for 
selfish reasons; various religious groups, such as the Quakers; a 
few economic dissenters, such as the Industrial Workers of the 
World. They received, as they must have expected, the violent 
disapproval of the group, expressed in terms of mob attack, 
legal imprisonment, or at least, extreme social disapproval. 
They were the unassimilated residuum of personality in the gen- 
eral unification of the American group under the pressure of 
an external foe. 


3. 


Then came the armistice in November, 1918. As Dr. Drach- 
sler remarks: 


? The war lasted long enough to make America painfully conscious of her 
peculiar problem of nationalism, but was not of long enough duration to 
fuse the divergent ethnic elements permanently. 


The artificial unity of war-time had no longer a purpose, and 
began instantly to dissolve into its component elements. But 
the high emotional tone of the war-time remained. Men still 
hated violently, but they could no longer release this hatred in 
battle or in sending others to battle. The repressive agencies 
remained in existence and in excellent running order; groups 
had learned how to use propaganda as an instrument; the habit 
of group pressure on subgroups and on different and opposing 
groups had been strengthened. Most of all, great masses of 
Americans had a new group consciousness of America as a 
eroup, with the uniformity of habit, opinion and conduct char- 
acteristic of their own subgroup taken as normal for the whole. 

The first result, then, was that the original subgroups fell 
apart and that their opposition was stronger and more open 


2 Drachsler: Democracy and Assimilation, p. 29. 


Te Anti-Semitism in the United States 


than before the war. This was due certainly to the heightened 
emotional tone, not only of the American mind, but every group 
mind the world over. During the war men and nations lived 
habitually under conditions of excitement, uncertainty and ten- 
sion. After the war the same emotional tone remained to color 
whatever group ideas might become associated with its action. 
So the whites who had drafted negroes to fight for them resented 
these same negroes coming home with the new pride of soldiers, 
remembering new equality of treatment they had received from 
the French. The daughters of the rich no longer danced with 
the poor, ignorant farm boys as they had in every cantonment. 
Prejudice against the uniform returned, and girls of certain 
classes would no longer care to be seen with soldiers or sailors; as 
they had when those men were expressing the group purpose by 
their very garments. And the hatred of the various immigrant 
groups for each other—the hatred of the older American groups 
against the immigrant, the Catholic and the Jew, returned with 
redoubied force. As the present writer found occasion to note 
directly after the close of the war: 


* During the war we felt that prejudice between men of different groups 
and different faiths was lessening day by day, that our common enthusiasm 
in our common cause had brought Catholics, Protestants and Jews nearer 
together on the basis of their ardent Americanism. Especially we who 
were at the front felt this in the first flush of our co-operation, our mutual 
interest and our mutual helpfulness. 


This disappointment was common to many of us who had 
allowed our hopes to run beyond our knowledge. 

Another cause of this unusual strength of group hatreds was 
the very repression of the war period. Individuals and sub- 
groups had sacrificed their prejudices for the common purpose, 
but they had done so without pleasure and as a sacrifice. Now 
- they resumed their group intolerance with redoubled zest due 
to long repression, whether that had been voluntary or forced. 
The ‘‘white, gentile, Protestant American’’ may have resented 
fighting on an equality with the negro, or under the orders of a 
foreigner—now that resentment had its vent. Never has group 


3A Jewish Chaplain in France, p. 214. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 73 


feeling run higher in America than in this reaction from the 
sudden, violent and partially artificial unity during our partici- 
pation in the World War. 

One notable result of this sudden relaxation of unity, this 
sudden predominance of the subgroups, appeared in the phenom- 
ena of displacement. Displacement is a common matter among 
paranoiacs, where one object is substituted for another with 
the same meaning and the same feeling-tone of resentment or of 
pleasure. It is also a common characteristic of mobs, which 
may be called for this and other reasons, a sort of social parano- 
iaes ; the lynching mob will turn from its intended victim to hang 
instead a public official or a bystander who objects even mildly 
to its program.* In this way the hatreds of war-time were dis- 
placed. The hatred for the German was displaced to the alien 
as a whole. The hatred and suspicion of Russia, aroused when 
that nation drew out of the war, and intensified when it adopted 
the radical economic program of, the Bolsheviki and the novel 
political rule of the Soviets, was displaced and applied to all 
economic radicals, whether Russian or American. Finally, the 
Jew was identified as a foreigner (even though he might be 
American-born and a veteran of the war) ; and as a radical (even 
though he might be an ultra-conservative capitalist). The 
ancient, lingering anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism of ages past 
appeared again; the Jew was not only a Christ-killer or a boor 
or a Semite,—for no accusation was ever entirely dropped— 
he was also an alien and a radical, an international banker and 
an enemy of gentile civilization. 


4Martin: The Behavior of Crowds. 


CHAPTER VI. 


THEVKU KREUK OR DAN 
AND OTHER GROUP REACTIONS 


The outstanding phenomenon of the post-war period was the 
Ku Klux Klan. Other events which accompanied it were the 
new laws for the limitation of immigration and the general 
suppression of civil liberties of many kinds. The Klan had 
something to do with both of these as cause and as effect. More- 
over, all three—Klan, anti-alien movement, anti-radical move- 
ment—were largely anti-Semitic in sentiment; in addition to 
which there was a separate movement of anti-Semitism based 
on the imported anti-Semitism from Europe. Therefore in any 
study of anti-Semitism as a group reaction we must also study 
these three group reactions of the post-war period, all of them 
partially anti-Semitic, and all of them associated with the same 
group-ideas and the same group-will as anti-Semitism itself. 


1, 


The Ku Klux Klan of the present is not the one of the Recon- 
struction period in any sense. It has taken over the name, the 
garb and much of the high-sounding ritual. But it has a new 
motive and a new psychology. The old Klan was sectional; the 
new is national. The old was anti-Northern and anti-negro; 
the new is anti-alien, anti-negro, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish. 
The old met a certain emergency and was then disbanded by 
compulsion of the Federal government and the action of its 
own leaders; the new has expanded from the character of a 
fraternal society to that of a nation-wide propaganda movement, 
has entered politics, and become one of the leading ‘political 
issues of the campaign of 1924. In other words, its real ances- 
tors are: not the Ku Klux Klan of the south in 1866-71, but 
the Know-Nothing Party of the 50’s and the A. P. A. of the 90’s. 

The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1915 in Atlanta, Ga., by 
William J. Simmons, a former Protestant minister of strong 
convictions, intense if narrow intellect, and great interest in 

74 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 113, 


the organization and spreading of fraternal orders. For five 
years it grew slowly and inconspicuously, during the period of 
the war and for two years thereafter; in June 1920 it had about 
five thousand members and was in financial straits. At this 
juncture it was taken up by Mr. Edward Young Clarke and 
Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler, who had had experience in the new tech- 
nique of propaganda. Under their skilled hands the Klan at 
once grew with astounding rapidity; paid organizers entered 
state after state, organized ‘‘Klaverns,’’ and reaped great profits 
for themselves and for the heads of the organization. But the 
commercial motive, while probably strong in a few persons, 
was in no sense important in the actual membership of the Klan 
and their acts. ‘‘Its official documents indicate that the Klan 
originally was a purely fraternal and patriotic organization, 
one of the hundreds of similar secret societies throughout the 
eountry.’"* The New York World investigated the Klan in 
1921, and a Congressional investigation followed in October of 
that year, but both served rather to advertise than to harm the 
organization. It spread rapidly throughout the Union, claiming 
at one time as many as four million members, elected senators 
and governors in a few instances, and in several became the out- 
standing issue of state elections, sponsored or was accused of 
innumerable acts of mob violence, ranging from warnings to 
certain persons to discontinue their bootlegging or immorality, 
up to beatings, tar-and-feather parties, and the notorious Mer 
Rouge murders of 1922 in Louisiana. 

We have already discussed the expansion of propaganda, so 
that its enormous utilization by the Klan is quite comprehensible. 
But even the constant reiteration of laudable motives and grand- 
iloguent phrases about Americanism cannot account for this 
sudden rise to: power; two other elements must be included— 
group prejudice and secrecy. The Klan capitalized every 
prejudice of its group, which was predominantly a small-town 
one, of American birth, Protestant religion, and Anglo-Saxon 
either in race or in their opinion of their race. And the Klan 
met in utter secrecy, did not divulge the names of its members, 


1Mecklin: The Ku Klux Klan, p. 20. 


76 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


paraded the streets in the disguise of robes and masks, and 
carried out its deeds of violence in the same awe-inspiring 
anonymity. 

Clearly, the Klan is typical of the tendencies we have found 
in the American mind after the war. It represents a subgroup 
revolting against its voluntary sacrifices for the nation during 
the war. It represents the anti-alien, anti-Catholic and now 
also anti-Jewish sentiment, the reaction against the enormous 
wave of immigration just at an end. It includes also the fear and 
hatred of the negro, strongest in the old South but spreading 
to the North with the northern migration of many negroes dur- 
ing and after the war. On the Pacific coast the fear of the 
Japanese immigration enters into the complex of hatreds. In 
other words, the Klan is the third wave of Nativism. It is the 
great reaction of the subgroup to the intense sacrifice for the 
nation during the war. 


2. 


Various other motives are implicated in this general complex. 
The South furnished the original soil of the Klan; its second 
center was the middle west, the old home of the A. P. A. It was 
weakest on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (except Oregon) 
where the various immigrant groups actually live. It was weak 
in the heterogeneous masses of the cities with their aliens, Catho- 
lies and Jews; strongest in the small town, where men may talk 
of the Papal menace without actually knowing many Catholics, 
of the Elders of Zion without seeing personally more than one 
or two Jews a year. The attitude of Nativism, the reaction to 
the immigration of huge masses of foreigners, is still strongest 
where these foreigners themselves are not in evidence. 

This suggests that other motives must enter in, that something 
else in the small-town American must have made the Klan con- 
genial. That something else is monotony, standardization (the 
‘Main Street’’ attitude), and the appeal of the Klan to these 
people lay largely in its glamor of mystery, secrecy and hidden 
power. The rise of fraternal orders is one of the note-worthy 
movements in American life; there are now over six hundred of 
these societies in the United States, of which four hundred 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 77 


ninety were organized between 1880 and 1895. Over seven per 
cent. of our population is affiliated with these orders, and their 
greatest strength is precisely in the small town, where they are 
a bright spot in the dull social life, and give a factitious im- 
portance to their ‘‘nobles’’ and ‘‘exalted rulers,’’ as well as to 
the many who are permitted to enter into their secrets and to 
parade in their regalia. Professor Mecklin’ classifies secret 
societies in three groups: the beneficial societies, with whom 
secrecy is merely protective; the social organizations, devised 
to give ‘‘variety and interest to our poverty-stricken American 
life’’; and finally, militant societies with a general program 
which affects the entire nation, like the old Ku Klux Klan, the 
Mafia, and the Fenians. He concludes that the present Klan, 
while undoubtedly furnishing for many of its members the 
release from monotony, the sense of power, the revolt against 
repression, that is characteristic of the second class of organiza- 
tions, has also the characteristics of the third type and is there- 
fore a public problem. As he points out elsewhere in his book, 
the disguise of the mask is a further danger, as it may be adopted 
by members to persecute non-members in nameless ways, and 
even presents an opportunity for non-Klansmen to indulge in 
violence practically without fear of detection. 

Professor Mecklin’s analysis of Klan psychology in Chapter 
IV of his book presents several suggestive points. He says: 

*The strength of the Klan lies in that large, well-meaning, but more or 
less ignorant and unthinking middle class, whose inflexible loyalty has pre- 
served with uncritical fidelity the traditions of the original American stock. 


*Membership in a vast mysterious Empire means a sort of mystic glori- 
fication of his petty self. 


The Klan insists on like-mindedness, in the sense of adopting the 
Anglo-Saxon ideals as the norm for America. Finally, 

*The Klan has literally battened upon the irrational fear psychology 
that followed on the heels of the war. 


Father John A. Ryan contributes an additional motive, 


‘There is a particular manifestation of public opinion which deserves 
emphasis as a cause of the recent intolerance. This is the conviction which 


4 The Kw Klux Klan; “ps 283. 22dem.) pe 1038) 4p. 108.0 Oo pe 122) 
Ryan: Art., Intolerance, in Pub. Amer. Sociological Society, Vol. XVIII. 


78 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


seized large and numerous groups of individuals that they were justified 
in becoming extra legal agents for law enforcement. . . . Hither the spirit 
or the letter of the law is violated in the name of the law itself. 


Frank Tannenbaum covers similar points in the first chapter of 
‘‘Darker Phases of the South,’’ where he deals with the Klan. 
He holds, first, that 


*The Klan is an attempt to maintain static what has become dynamic. 
*The war left a common mood upon the world . . . the hate is generated 
as a means of justifying the thrill to be derived from abusing the people 
hated. The Klan is a reaction to boredom; it is a means of fulfilling the 
millennial hopes frustrated by the outcome of the war; it gives vent to a 
type of war hysteria. * The idealization of the white women in the South 
is partly the unconscious self-protection on the part of the white men from 
their own bad habits, notions, beliefs, attitudes and practises, a matter of 
over-compensation. 


To his keen psychoanalytic study I must add a few words from 
an article by Frank Bohn in the American Journal of Sociology. 
7©Mr. Bohn points out that the Klan, once organized, had to 
find something to do, that its violence was a natural outcome of 
disguise, organization and aimlessness. He attributes its origin 
chiefly to the disillusionment of the American people over the 
break-down of their simple, democratic ideals when applied to a 
huge nation of complex population; and to the changing char- 
acter of the racial and social composition of the people, with 
the revolt of the older stocks. He concludes: 


The civilization of the United States is suffering rapid changes, not only 
as regards its basic institutions, but also in the nature and quality of its 
human composition. The hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan are an 
expression of pain, of sorrow and of solemn warning. Its methods arise 
from anger and fear, not from knowledge and forethought. 


3. 


A word may be needed especially on our narrower topic, the 
relation of the Ku Klux Klan to the Jew. Its preliminary ques- 
tions to the candidate for ‘‘naturalization’’ include two that ex- 
clude the Catholic, two the Jew, one the alien and one the negro. 


7 Tannenbaum: Darker Phases of the South, p. 20. ®p.15. ®p. 33. 
10Bohn: American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1925, pp. 385-407. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 79 


The most inclusive is number 2: ‘‘Are you a native born, white, 
Gentile American citizen?’’ Number 4 is: ‘‘Do you believe 
in the tenets of the Christian religion?’’ Imperial Wizard H. 
W. Evans gave out an interview in Indianapolis early in 1924 
when he made the following statement, repeated several time 
later in other connections: 


By deliberate election he (the Jew) is unassimilable. He rejects inter- 
marriage. His religious and social rites and customs are inflexibly segre- 
gative. Law-abiding, healthy, moral, mentally alert, energetic, loyal and 
reverent in his home life, the Jew is yet by primal instinct a Jew, indelibly 
marked by persecution, with no deep national attachment, a stranger to the 
emotion of patriotism as the Anglo-Saxon feels it. Klansmen have no 
quarrel with him, no hatred of him, no thought of persecuting him. As 
Protestants are unavailable for membership in all-Jewish societies, so Jews 
are unavailable for membership in an all-Protestant society like the Klan. 
Moreover, their jealously guarded separatism unfits them for co-operation 
in a movement dedicated to the thorough unification of the dominant strains 
in American life. 


Here are the same themes of racial superiority, like-minded- 
ness of America, identification of Americanism and Protestant- 
ism. But elsewhere we meet with direct attacks on the Jew, as 
on the Catholic, negro and foreigner—not merely the assertion 
of their inferiority. Speaking at Dallas, Texas, December 7, 1922, 
Mr. Evans said: 


The Jew produces nothing anywhere on the face of the earth. He does 
not till the soil. He does not create or manufacture anything for common 
use. He adds nothing to the sum of human welfare. Everywhere he stands 
between the producer and the consumer and sweats the toil of the one and 
the necessity of the other for his gains. 


This sounds like an economic motive, but it may be merely 
repetition of stock charges of traditional anti-Semitism. Mr. 
Bohn hints at such an economic purpose when he remarks: 


One factor has been the recent invasion of the smaller western and 
southern towns by Jewish retail merchants. These are disliked and opposed 
by their native American competitors for purely commercial reasons. 


These facts seem to me erroneous; there have always been Jewish 
merchants and peddlers throughout the country, and they have 
always had Christian competitors; probably they have merely 


80 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


been a point of vantage for the aroused prejudices of the group. 
Dr. Mecklin says: 


“The Klan insists, in the published statements of its ideals, upon com- 
plete religious toleration while in actual practise it encourages boycotts of 
Catholic and Jew in business and social relations. * The eternal quarrel of 
the Klan with the Jew and the Negro is that mental and physical differ- 
ences seem to have conspired to place them in groups entirely to themselves. 

. The Negro is granted a place in American society only upon his 
willingness to accept a subordinate position. The Jew is tolerated largely 
because native Americanism cannot help itself. The Jew is disliked because 
of the amazing tenacity with which he resists absolute Americanization, 
a dislike that is not unmingled with fear; the Negro is disliked, because 
he is considered essentially an alien and unassimilable element in society. 


4. 


The Klan has now passed the zenith of its aggressiveness and 
its influence. The campaign of exposure, while it made thou- 
sands of members, also made thousands of enemies and robbed 
the Klan of the secrecy which was so essential an element of its 
strength. Many of its members lost interest, others were posi- 
tively estranged by certain methods and ideals of the organiza- 
tion. The trials for murder at Mer Rouge, La., brought the 
Klan into bad odor generally. Most important of all, the Klan 
went into politics, and in this followed exactly the cycle of the 
Know-Nothings and A. P. A.’s—secrecy, growth, propaganda, 
politics, enemies, decline. In 1924 the Klan was an element in 
the national conventions of the two major parties. The Repub- 
licans considered planks opposing and favoring the organization 
and finally took no action. The Democrats had to take up the 
issue because of the movement to nominate as their presidential 
candidate Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York, and a pro- 
fessing Catholic. While Mr. Smith had political supporters in 
his own state of every religious denomination, still the entire 
strength of the Klan was thrown against him. At the same time, 
the many Irish Catholics belonging to the Democratic party 
resented the attempt of the Klan to dictate the nomination and 


Up. 168. 
12, 110. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 81 


introduced a resolution attacking the Klan by name. The con- 
flict of that convention is now historic, and resulted in 
thoroughly disorganizing the Democratic party for the ensuing 
campaign. 

Finally, the passage of the immigration bills of 1921 and 1924 
robbed the Klan of its chief reason for existence, its most potent 
argument. Immigration was abruptly cut down. Not only that, 
but its national origin was totally altered so as to favor the 
peoples of northern and western Europe, and to keep out the 
Italian Catholics and Russian Jews. It is no longer possible to 
stimulate fear or hatred on such a large scale again, now that 
immigration is no longer a large factor in American life, and 
the group integration is once more proceeding at its accustomed 
TAL 


D. 


The anti-immigration movement must not be regarded as a 
result of the Klan but as a parallel phenomenon, with the same 
motives and philosophy. The original political theory and eco- 
nomic situation, by which all immigrants were welcomed into the 
United States to help build up the country and to become full 
Americans has been slowly altering. The first law of limitation, 
passed in 1882, and followed up by later amendments, merely 
excluded convicts, persons affected with contagious diseases, 
persons likely to become public charges, and similar individuals 
for individual reasons. Other legislation of economic trend ex- 
cluded Chinese and later Japanese laborers, and contract labor. 
In 1917 the demand to limit the numbers of common labor, 
voiced by the American Federation of Labor, met the desire to 
limit numbers and to select racial groups, and the literacy test 
was embodied in the law, excluding all who could not read or 
write in any language. But this was satisfactory to neither 
the friends nor foes of immigration; it was merely a temporary 
device. 

In May 1921 a temporary law was passed limiting the number 
of each nation to enter the United States annually to 3% of 
natives of that nation residing here in 1910. This limited the 
total immigration at once from the 1,285,349 of 1907, the peak 


82 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


year, to a total of 357,803. This total is in addition to immi- 
grants from Canada, Mexico, Newfoundland, Cuba and Central 
and South America; it does not deduct the emigrants who often 
amount to aS many or more than those entering the country. 
It is simply a means of cutting down numbers and altering 
proportions. It is directly a result of Klan preachments, of 
Nordic theories, of the reaction of the native, gentile, Protestant 
American to the growing complexity and heterogeneity of the 
nation, and to the need of revising his mental stereotypes of the 
United States. He must grow to think of his nation as a nation 
of many elements, many beliefs, many backgrounds, most of 
them different from his own—to him America is a Protestant 
country, a white man’s country, a gentile country, and he in- 
tends that it shall remain so. 

Therefore the permanent immigration bill enacted in May, 
1924, changed the percentage from three to two, and the date 
on which the quota is to be estimated from 1910 to 1890. The 
result of this double change is to alter radically the racial and 
national composition of the immigration stream and hence the 
total character of the United States. As Chairman Albert John- 
son of the House Committee on Immigration, after whom the 
bill was named, phrased its double purpose: 


* The committee took a very important step in recommending a perma- 
nent percentage law and thus recognizing the principle that the United 
States should never keep its doors wide open. Second, the percentage is 
based on the census of 1890 instead of the census of 1910, as in the present 
law. The new measure thus aims to change the character of our future 
immigration by cutting down the number of aliens who can come from 
southern and eastern Europe. In other words, it is recognized that, on the 
whole, northern and western Europe furnish the best material for citizen- 
ship. 


The total immigration, therefore, was reduced from 357,000 
to 164,667 and the emigrants have to be deducted from this to 
ascertain the actual annual increase. The Italian quota was 
reduced from 42,000 to 3,845; the Russian from 24,000 to 2,200; 
the Polish from 30,000 to 6,000. On the other hand, the German 
quota was reduced only from 67,000 to 51,000; the Norwegian 


13 Johnson: The Nation’s Business, July 1923, pp. 26-8. 


Anti-Semitism mm the United States 83 


from 12,000 to 6,400; the British and Irish from 77,000 to 62,500. 
The bill carried out radically the intentions of its sponsors, to 
eut down the flood of immigration and to discriminate against 
the racial and religious groups which they consider inferior 
because they appear externally to be different. It is a group 
reaction of the same order and motivation as the Ku Klux Klan. 


6 


A concurrent phenomenon, arising from the same group mind 
but essentially different in manifestation, is the suppression of 
civil liberties which began during the war and continued after- 
ward, an expression of the same impulse toward compulsory 
like-mindedness, but taking its eriterion from the economic 
rather than the cultural, religious or racial aspects of the differ- 
ing groups. As Father Ryan put it: 


*These deplorable phenomena are three-fourths due to war legislation 
and surviving war hysteria and one-fourth due to industrial factors. . . 
By means of clever, unscrupulous and wholesale propaganda, nine-tenths 
of the American people were led to believe that the steel strike of 1919 was 
revolutionary, bolshevistic, and aimed immediately at the overthrow of the 
government. As a matter of fact, there was no more bolshevism in that 
contest than in any one of a dozen important disputes that have occurred 
in the last ten years. Attorney General Palmer asserted that there was an 
organized attempt to overthrow the government of the United States 
sufficiently widespread to merit the attention of Congress. As a matter 
of fact, there was no such danger. 


© Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary, in the 
same Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, has a fine 
summary of the ‘‘Repression of Civil Liberties in the United 
States (1918-23).’’ He enumerates the new Supreme Court 
interpretation of the free-speech clause of the first amendment 
to the Constitution, by which a ‘‘clear and present danger’’ 
justifies its violation; the state laws on syndicalism or sedition 
or anarchy; the attacks on the right of labor to strike; the use 
of the Department of Justice of the United States to repress 
radical economic movements ; the mob violence increasingly wide- 


4 Ryan, p. 124. 
15 Ward: Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, Vol. XVIII. 


84 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


spread and regular; and the national organizations engaged in 
repression, such as the National Civic Federation, the National 
Security League, and the Better American Federation. 

The material is too wide in range and too full of important 
instances to be even cursorily examined here. The trend, how- 
ever, was definitely a part of the post-war attitude of the Amer- 
ican mind, the breaking up into violently opposing groups, each 
claiming to assert the true American spirit. The same attitude 
of repression appears in the churches in the form of heresy trials 
and an aggressive Fundamentalism. It appears in the form 
of legislative acts to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the 
state universities of several Southern states (most of which 
failed of passage). Dr. Ward feels that the 


Mob attacks, lynchings and prosecutions involving the use of free speech 
reached their peak at the end of 1922, declining rapidly in. 1923. Inter- 
ference with meetings by public authorities and private groups reached a 
peak at the end of 1921, fell sharply in 1922, and then went up again to 
a midway point in 1923, . . . * We have a manifest abatement of post- 
war repression, but that experience has left us a heritage of repressive 
laws and ordinances and a technique of administrative illegality all ready 
to be used on due occasion. It has also strengthened our lynching habit of 
mind, with its determination to enforce its type of goodness, and our tra- 
ditional demand for conformity already overstimulated by the increasing 
standardization of life. The occasions for the use of those qualities and 
instruments of repression are increasing rather than diminishing. 


Attempts were made during the height of the anti-Russian and 
anti-radical movement to connect Jews with Bolshevism in 
Russia and with radicalism in the United States, so that this 
movement also has its anti-Semitic phase. Thus anti-Semitism 
is bound up with the Ku Klux Klan, with the immigration bills, 
with the economic repression,—it is an integral part of the group 
reaction from national unity, and appears in every phase of the 
post-war group reactions. i 


16 Ward, p. 145. 


CHAPTER VII 


ANTI-SEMITISM 


In ‘‘Loyalties’’ by John Galsworthy, there occur two state- 
ments of anti-Semitism so powerful and so keen that they may 
serve as a key to the whole situation. The young Jew has ac- 
eused a Christian aristocrat of stealing his purse. The gentile 
girl, naturally a liberal, has to choose her loyalty. She says: 
““Oh! I know lots of splendid Jews, and I rather like little 
Ferdie; but when it comes to the point—they all stick together ; 
why shouldn’t we? It’s in the blood .... Prejudices—or are 
they loyalties—I don’t know—criss-cross—we all cut each other’s 
throats from the best of motives.’’ And later on an English 
grocer of the lower middle class confesses: ‘‘To tell you the 
truth, I don’t like—well, not to put too fine a point on it— 
‘ebrews. They work harder; they’re more sober; they’re 
honest; and they’re everywhere. I’ve nothing against them, 
but the fact is—they get on so.’’ 


1. 


Anti-Semitism is, then, a typical because a violent group at- 
titude. In America in its newest manifestation it is a part of 
the complex of group revolts after the World War; it is in- 
timately associated with the Ku Klux Klan, anti-immigration 
movement, and repression generally, at the same time that it has 
distinctive phases of its own. As Lewis 8S. Gannett wrote: 


* Because anti-Semitism is world-wide it is easy to assume that it has the 
same causes everywhere; but conditions in America are very different from 
conditions in countries where religion is taught in the schools, where the 
Jews are virtually all middlemen, where the Ghetto is an abiding place for 
generations of the same family. . . . American anti-Semitism can largely 
be explained without reference to the religious beliefs of Christians or Jews. 


This last statement applies only to the immediate situation, not 
the background. 


+The Nation, March 21, 1923. 
85 


86 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


The two elements in American anti-Semitism, then, are the 
imported prejudice from Europe and the American soil which 
received it. The form of the prejudice was the importation; its 
material backing and impulse was the native American reaction 
against the apparently new or apparently different group. The 
intensity of the movement at this particular moment in history 
is a part of the post-war mental state of the American people. 
In addition to the movements described in the last chapter there 
are other manifestations mentioned in the introduction: such as 
the attempt to limit the proportion of Jews in the colleges; the 
anti-Semitic books and periodicals; and the activity of the 
Russian emigrés constituting the immediate connecting link with 
anti-Semitism in Europe and the world over. The agencies 
which hunted down the radicals, whether as Russian sympathiz- 
ers or from economic motives or merely as a different group, 
tried assiduously to find Jews among their leaders and were 
bitterly disappointed when economic radicalism turned out to 
be an American movement in which Jews had merely a minority 
share. 

As we have seen, in 1919 the soil of the United, States was 
abundantly prepared for the imported seeds of anti-Semitism. 
Group was arrayed against group, native and alien, Nordic and 
South European, Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew. 
In addition to the local and timely fact, we must also presuppose 
an old inheritance of specific prejudice against the Jew of a 
strictly religious nature. This is by no means the immediate 
occasion of the present movement, as it may have been of 
pogroms in Russia; but it is certainly an element in the national 
subconseiousness and in the conscious thinking of certain more 
orthodox Christian churches. Granted that Horace M. Kallen 
exaggerates the importance of this factor, still he has done well 
in pointing it out. He says: 

*In the Christian system the Jews are assigned a central and dramatic 
status. They are the villains of the Drama of Salvation. . . . Nowhere in 


Europe could there be a village to whose inhabitants the word ‘‘Jew’’ did 
not denote the people who had denied the Savior and crucified Him, who 


The Nation, February 28, 1923. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States | 87 


were thus the enemies of God and of mankind. . . . The word ‘‘ Jew’’ became 
a stimulus which touched off this emotion. It was a word to curse with. 

. . The root of the special Jewish difficulty is the position of the Jews in 
the Christian religion. If you can end this teaching that the Jews are 
enemies of God and of mankind you will strike anti-Semitism at its 
foundations. 


Certainly the teachings of infancy and childhood have left this 
residue of anti-Judaism in the minds of millions of persons 
who would be the first to deny the possession of religious big- 
otry ; certainly the Christian church, as a group mind, contains 
a tradition of anti-Judaism as one of its ideas. But this means | 
merely that religion to the Jew takes the place of skin color to | 
the Negro or language to the Czech. We have ancient warrant 
that so trivial a matter as the mispronunciation of the word Shib- 
boleth was sufficient identification for one sub-group of He- 
brews to kill members of another group of their own people. 
All that intolerance needs is some mark of identification, how- 
ever irrelevant or petty, to set off the rival group. 


2. 


The European importation at this period was the race theory. 
Originated in France by Gobineau, taken up in Germany by 
scientific thinkers and made the rallying ery of political parties, 
the theory was adapted to American conditions. In Germany 
and France the ‘‘great race’’ was the Teuton, below whom were 
ranged in order the Alpine, the Mediterranean, and the Semite. 
The safety of the Teuton and therefore of civilization as a whole 
depend on the purity of blood of the Teuton and his guarding 
from contamination by alien blood. The Semite, in particular, 
is a menace by reason of his lower moral and social standards 
and his inability ever to be assimilated by the higher races; he 
must be driven out of power and if possible out of the ‘‘sacred 
German land’’ itself. In the United States this theory was taken 
over bodily by such writers as Lothrop Stoddard and Grant 
Madison, with the trifling change that the word ‘‘Teuton’’ was 
altered to ‘‘Nordic.’’ This was done in order to include the 
many sub-varieties of the older immigration, most of whom 


88 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


came at some time from northern and western Europe. The 
Klan and the writers in the Dearborn Independent echoed them. 
The Russians in the United States attacking the Soviet govern- 
ment, many sub-groups of new Americans who imported their 
anti-Semitism with them, and the constant flood of letters, peri- 
odicals and books regarding the growth of mob violence, politi- 
eal discrimination and social obloquy in Europe, furnished the 
connecting link. The race theory became acclimatized. 

Peculiarly enough, one of the most radical statements of the 
race theory was by a Jew, Maurice Samuel in ‘‘ You Gentiles,’’ 
where he showed quite unintentionally how the theory is re- 
versible to form opposite conclusions on the same premises. ‘To 
Samuel, Jew and gentile are two radically different sorts of 
people, as the anti-Semite agrees; the difference he finds, how- 
ever, is one of temperament, of viewpoint. 


*To you (gentiles) life is a game and a gallant adventure, and all life’s 
enterprises partake of the spirit of the adventurous. To us (Jews) life is 
a serious and sober duty pointed to a definite and inescapable task. * We 
know nothing of science for science’s sake, as we know nothing of art for 
art’s sake. We know only of art for God’s sake. . . . Art and science, 
this is your gentile world, a lovely and ingenious world. . . . But not our 
world, not for us Jews. 


To this we may contrast the remark of Irwin Edman: 


*The Jews have been accused so often of impossible racial defects that 
they have in self defense, ascribed to themselves wholly imaginary racial 
virtues. . . . They have added to the unfavorable myths invented by out- 
siders a whole folklore of favorable myths about themselves. 


The reprints from the Dearborn Independent can match this 
sort of hasty generalization a hundred times over in the lan- 
guage of anti-Semitism. 


°The Jew is against the Gentile scheme of things. What are the causes 
of this disruptive tendency? First, his essential lack of democracy. Jewish 
nature is autocratic. ‘In a sense the United States is private property. 
It is the property of those who share the ideals of the founders of the 
government. And those ideals were ideals held by a white race of Chris- 


3 Samuel: You Gentiles, p. 31. ‘4p. 175. 
5 Menorah Journal, November 1924, p. 425. 
° The International Jew, p. 88. 

TNVol. 2, pe 249. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 89 


tians. And with most of these the Jews not only disagree, but hold them in 
contempt. * The fathers were the men of the Anglo-Saxon-Celtie race . 
who have given form to every government and a livelihood to every people 
and an ideal to every century. They got neither their God nor their 
religion from Judah, nor yet their speech nor their creative genius—they 
are the Ruling People, Chosen throughout the centuries to Master the 
world. . . . Into the camp of this race comes a people that has no civiliza- 
tion to point to, no aspiring religion, no universal speech, no great achieve- 
ment in any realm but the realm of ‘‘ get,’’ cast out of every land that gave 
them hospitality, and these people endeavor to tell the sons of the Saxons 
what is needed to make the world what it ought to be. 


3. 


I shall devote very few words to showing that this race theory, 
whether from the Nordic or any other angle, is composed of 
hasty and unscientific generalizations, merely the rationaliza- 
tion of the group prejudice whose actual background we are 
tracing. In the first place, anthropologists are not at all agreed 
either on the definition or the history of races. There seems, 
however, to be fairly general agreement that there is no such 
thing as a pure race—certainly not the English and probably 
not the Jews either. All sub-varieties of the white race are 
greatly mixed in blood. For the Jewish side of this problem, 
an interesting study is that of M. Fishberg, ‘‘The Jews, a Study 
of Race and Environment,’’ where the author has demonstrated 
the many physical types which appear in the Jewish people the 
world over, whether these are due to local and climatic influ- 
ences, or aS Dr. Fishberg holds, to interbreeding with other 
racial stocks. In the second place, even such racial groupings 
as can be roughly established vary indefinitely and overlap in- 
definitely in every physical and mental characteristic. There 
is no considerable body of people who conform to the Nordic 
type—blond, tall, long-headed, and so on. No test has ever been 
devised which can adequately compare the intelligence of dif- 
ferent races, for every intelligence test yet invented presupposes 
a certain cultural and language background, and is therefore 
favorable to the group which has this background, and certain 





8 Vol. 4, pp. 50-1. 


90 Anti-Semitism im the United States 


to give a low intelligence quotient to any different cultural 
croup, whatever be its race or its potential intellectual power. 

As Jean Finot sums up the entire theory in his book, ‘‘ Race 
Prejudice’’: 


*The differences among individuals belonging to the same human variety 
are always greater than those perceived between races regarded as distinct 
units. 

*0No one has ever been able to show a single authentic Aryan. The 
descriptions of him, both moral and physical, his measurements and also 
the description of his inner life, are all purely fantastical. . . . Today 
out of a thousand educated Europeans, nine hundred ninety-nine are per- 
suaded of the authenticity of their Aryan origin. In the history of human 
errors this doctrine will some day without doubt assume a place of honor. 

When we go through the list of external differences which appear to 
divide men, we find literally nothing which can authorize their division 
into superior and inferior beings, into masters and pariahs. . . . The 
science of inequality is emphatically a science of White people. In pursu- 
ing this course the elementary commandments of experimental science are 
transgressed. 

“In a word, the term, race, is only a product of our mental activities, 
and outside all reality. . . . They (races) exist in us but not outside us. 


The eminence of certain European nations today is historical 
and cultural, not racial. Otherwise, how explain the past emi- 
nence of Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome? True, some try 
to detect an admixture of Nordic, or at least of Aryan blood 
in these nations as a cause of their onee high civilization. But 
to claim this is so to dilute the meaning of the word that al- 
most any blood may be considered ‘‘Aryan.’’ The fact is that 
the Jew now in the United States did not kill Jesus but is still 
accused of it; and is not a Semite but is still accused of that. 
The one accusation like the other is merely a rationalization of 
the social trait of intolerance, now sprung to growth in the 
United States. 


4, 


Minor accusations against the Jews need only summary con- 
sideration. Needless to say, many of them are true but prob- 
ably none of them are actual causes for hatred of the Jews. 


®Finot: Race Prejudice, p. 88. 7 p. 221. Up, 310. 2 DSL. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 91 


The theory of Burton J. Hendrick that the Russian Jews are 
inferior racially to the west European ones is merely another 
variety of the race theory and is worth no more than any va- 
riety. The Jews are called materialists and money-grabbers, 
which many of them are, aswell as many non-Jews; they are 
accused of having wealth and of being subverters of wealth, © 
and some Jews are in each of these categories. Some Jews are 
bootleggers, as they are called. Possibly some Jews have been 
traitors, though the writer in the Dearborn Independent seems 
to have taken a great deal of trouble to prove that Benedict | 
Arnold may or may not have had some Jewish accomplices. © 
Certainly the complaint of the colleges that many of their Jew- | 
ish students are not socially acceptable is entirely correct. The — 
Jew is the only immigrant group whose poor boys attend insti- | 
tutions of higher learning in any large numbers. Other groups © 
usually wait at least a generation until they have acquired both 
prosperity and some American culture before their children 
attend college. Besides, there are a number of Catholic uni- 
versities which are attended by many Irish and Italian youths, 
while there is no such school to divert the Jewish youth. Hence 
there is no doubt that many young Jews attend college who are 
externally uncouth, who speak English with an accent, who 
wear shabby clothes, and who have no interest in athletics, danc- 
ing or undergraduate activities. It is certain, however, that 
these young people learn to conform very rapidly indeed; and 
that, before they learn, they may be able to contribute a little 
variety and interest to the montony of American youth. 

A charge of great importance during the height of prejudice 
against the Russian Soviet government was that the Jews were 
responsible for that government, its’stécess and its excesses. The 
inevitable conclusion was, then, that the Jews were trying to 
introduce the ideals of the Soviets into the United States. Even 
when this conclusion was not drawn, the connection was so em- 
phasized as to minister to anti-Semitic sentiment. John 
Spargo** made a special effort to minimize this rather indirect, 
but at the time very dangerous piece of propaganda. He showed 


143 Spargo: The Jew and American Ideals. 


92 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


that the number of Jews in high position in Russia was very 
small, while the larger number of government clerks and simi- 
lar functionaries was due to the larger percentage of educated 
men among Jews than among the mass of Russians; that the 
great commercial class of Jews were financially ruined by the 
socialistic policy of the government; that the Jews of Russia 
were divided among the several political parties for and against 
the Communists; and finally that the Bolsheviki had suppressed 
Jewish religious schools, like Christian ones, and estranged the 
orthodox of both religions. But the anti-Semitic writers used 
the Russian Revolution to show the growing menace of Jewish 
power the world over. 

Finally, the charge of the Dearborn Independent that there 
is a Jewish world conspiracy to overthrow the governments of 
the world in favor of an all-Judaic power. To the person who 
knows Jewish life, broken into so many conflicting theories and 
different cultural and economic groups, the whole viewpoint is 
too ridiculous to require disproof. It is merely another sign 
that the modern conception of social and economic process is 
very new indeed and has made little headway into the group 
mind. Every world process from the World War to the fall 
of the German mark, from immodest clothing to vapid popular 
songs, must be blamed on a person or race. In this case the 
person disliked is the Jew, and everything is blamed on him. 
But a different group prejudice could just as well ascribe these 
same factors to the German (as during the war), to the Rus- 
Sian, to the international bankers, or to the Republican party. 
Again, we are confronted by the rationalization of a group prej- 
udice, and in this case the rationalization is merely unusually 
fantastic. 

As Ludwig Lewisohn sums up anti-Jewish prejudice: 


4 Jew-baiting has nothing to do with the quality of Jewish character- — 
istics. We are hated for our wealth and for our poverty, for our plutocrats 
and for our Reds, for display and for hard-headedness and warm-hearted- 
ness, for arrogance and servility, for pushingness and reserve, for speech 
and silence, for political participation and nonparticipation. If we desire 


14 The Nation, February 20, 1924. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 93 


assimilation you drive us out of your universities by chicanery and insult; 
if we do not strive after assimilation you say we ought to go where we 
came from. 


To this we may compare the interesting if somewhat hasty 
oeneralization of Friedman: 


* Any unabsorbed social group generates the ill will of the majority. 

. It is characteristic for the superior culture to absorb the inferior. 

. The seeming slowness of this movement is an irritant to the non- 

Jewish world and the persistence of the Jews as a distinctive cultural group 

is resented by the dominant group. It is an implied challenge to the 
supremacy of the culture of the lands where Jews dwell. 


And Shailer speaks of 1° ‘‘This most striking and universal of 
ethnic judgments,’’ that the Jews are an unpleasant people, The 
Semite to him is ‘‘the ablest type of man the world has known, 
but a type that is somewhat archaic’’ because religious rather 
than scientific in mental trend. He feels that Jew and Aryan 
are different in their mode of meeting the stranger, the Jew is 
more impulsive due to swifter mental processes, which invariably 
causes bad first impressions to be later overcome. And so on. 
These reasons seem hardly better than those of the anti-Semites 
themselves—for the Jew today is not a Semite; Dr. Shailer 
. compared him with the rather repressed New Englander at Har- 
vard, not with the Aryan of Germany or Italy or Russia; since 
he wrote seven Jews have received the Nobel prize for scientific 
distinction; and finally, the challenge to the superior race (of 
Dr. Friedman) is simply the fact of difference. No charac- 
terization of the Jew accounts for anti-Semitism, whether it be 
formulated by friend or foe; the only genuine causes are those | 
that can be found in the group mind itself. 


5. 


In addition to the background of American group mind, al- 
ready studied, and the imported theory of anti-Semitism, there 
are certain facts which affect the situation in its special mani- 
festations. The most important of these is the great increase of 


Friedman: Survival or Extinction, p. 110. 
16 Shailer: The Neighbor. 


94. Anti-Semitism in the United States 


Jewish .population in the United States. At the time of the 
Know-Nothings there were not over 50,000 Jews in this coun- 
try, and many of them had lived here since before the Revolu- 
tion, possessing fine patriotic records; there was thus no motive 
to single them out for the anti-alien agitation of that period. 
At the time of the A. P. A., there were about 500,000 Jews, 
but these were still not a large enough group to attract special 
attention; they were widely scattered through the south and 
west; and the agitation against the larger numbers of Catholic 
immigrants passed them by. In 1925, however, the number of 
Jews in the United States is estimated at 3,600,000, of whom 
1,735,000 have immigrated into America in the last 25 years, 
and 900,000 of these in the last 15. Here, then, is a tremendous 
body of Jews who are also foreigners, who speak the Yiddish 
language, adhere to traditional Jewish religious practices, and 
who are massed in great bodies in certain cities and in certain 
industries. The foreign Jew is thus more conspicuous today 
than any other immigrant group, even than those much larger 
in number. New York City alone has 1,500,000 Jews, such a 
huge number of whom are of obviously foreign origin that they 
are a conspicuous attraction for the intolerance of other groups 
in America. As Mecklin says: 

“The Jew, who has recently been coming to this country mainly from 
Russia and Southeastern Europe by hundreds and thousands, and who, true 
to his urban traits, has erowded into New York and other large cities where 
his native characteristics are thrust into the face of the native American 
on the street, in the hotel or department store, has also come in for his 
share of the prevalent fear psychology. Henry Ford . . . has voiced the 


fears of the native American brought into close contact with the unassimi- 
lated and disagreeably alien Jewish population of our large centers. 


A special feature of this present.Jewish immigration is that 
much of it comes from a belated civilization. The Jew of Poland 
or Ukrainia or Rumania steps from an-agricultural society into 
an industrial one; from an aristocratic class society into a demo- 
cratic one; from an isolated Jewish Ghetto life into a maelstrom 
of races and cultural groups, among whom he must grope his 
way. No wonder that his adjustment is not always a correct 


7 Mecklin: The Ku Klux Klan, p. 125. 


Anti-Semitism i the United States 95 


one, still less often the same adjustment as that of the stand- 
arized, typical American. Many of them become radicals in 
economics, religion and politics as a reaction against their 
former experience of oppression; some of them were pro-Ger- 
man during the World War to oppose their former Russian 
tyrants; for all of them the problem is doubly difficult because 
it involves not only a personal adjustment to new economic and 
social conditions, but also the group adjustment into the life , 
of the United States. Many of them in their new-found free- 
dom become super-patriots, take America to their hearts, and 
are thus doubly disappointed when América also repulses them. 

But Jewish immigration also has been largely stopped and 
the foreign aspect of American Jewry is rapidly disappearing. 
In 1914, the Jewish admissions to the United States numbered 
138,000 or 11.3% ; when departures are taken into account, the 
Jews became 14.3% of the total. During the war the Jewish 
immigration was negligible; but in 1921 it again amounted to 
119,000 or 14.7% of the total, or deducting departures, 21.2%. 
The passage of the quota law of 1921 resulted in reducing the 
total Jewish admissions to 53,000 and 49,000 in the next two 
years; or 17.3% and 9.5% of the total admissions. As 1922 
was a year of many departures among Greeks, Italians and 
several other groups, the net Jewish immigration of that year 
actually amounted to 47.5% of the total net immigration. The 
effect of the 1924 immigration act has already been noted by 
social workers and others in touch with immigration, but it is 
still too early to show by statistics what has occurred, namely 
the practical cessation of this great Jewish immigration into 
the United States. It is obvious that this fact will alter the 
animus and the nature of anti-Semitism, just as all anti-alien 
sentiments, even though it will not eradicate the other causes 
and therefore will not stop anti-Semitism completely. 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE RETORT TO ANTI-SEMITISM 


There are two kinds of answers possible to a movement like 
anti-Semitism, the explicit refutation of its doctrines and teach- 
ings, whether by Jews or non-Jews; and the response by adjust- 
ment and by psychological traits. It is a commonplace that 
Jewish loyalty is always strengthened by anti-Semitism; it is 
equally true that the Jewish inferiority complex is conditioned, 
if not caused, by anti-Semitism. In fact, we may well conclude 
that Jewish characteristics are greatly influenced and molded 
by the adverse forces of the environment. Both these types of 
response, the explicit and the implied, exist in this particular 
case, whether as counterpart or as results of anti-Semitism it- 
self, and both can be traced in the United States in connection 
with the present movement. 


ny 


Defense of Jews by non-Jews is a notable phenomenon of 
modern times, associated with the general growth of tolerance. 
Beginning with the Renaissance there have been a few hardy 
spirits In every generation who were willing to espouse the cause 
of these pariahs of Christendom, chiefly the liberals who were 
challenging group standards in many directions. Such advo- 
cates as Mirabeau, Lessing, Jefferson and Macaulay endeavored 
to remove Jewish disabilities and to defend the Jews against 
the attacks of the intolerant groups. Here in America we have 
seen the same result; the use of the individual intelligence has 
drawn many non-Jews out of the unified group mind of the 
persecutors; many entire groups, in fact, of Catholics, liberals, 
and others had never entered into it. Even before the World 
War the Reverend Madison Peters of Brooklyn was widely 
known for his book, ‘‘ Justice to the Jew,’’ and several similar 
volumes. More recently, as a definite reply to the anti-Semitic 
writers there have appeared ‘‘The Jew and American Ideals,’’ 
by John Spargo; ‘‘The Jew and Civilization’’ by Ada Sterling ; 

96 » 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 97 


‘‘The Truth about the Jews, by a Gentile,’’ by Walter Hurt; 
and ‘‘Patriotism of the American Jew’’ by Samuel W. McCall. 
These works and others like them, of varying merit, were defi- 
nitely apologetic in nature. A number of periodicals published 
articles either avowedly in defense of the Jew, or purporting to: 
examine the Jewish problem fairly and without intolerance. 
Such were the brilliant series by able thinkers, which I have 
quoted so frequently, in the Nation; by Norman Hapgood in 
Hearst’s International; by Wiliam Hard in the Metropolitan 
Magazine; by Arthur Brisbane in his syndicated newspaper: 
column, and many others. Former President William Howard 
Taft, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, during the in- 
terval between these high offices, wrote a speech on ‘‘ Anti-Sem- 
itism in the United States,’’ which he delivered in many parts. 
of the country and which was printed by the Anti-Defamation 
League. 

Several actions of larger bodies of non-Jews lent even more: 
dignity to this counter-movement. On December 5, 1920, the 
Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the 
great Protestant federation, passed the following resolution in 
its national convention in Boston: 


Whereas, for some time past there have been in circulation in this country 
publications tending to create race prejudice and arouse animosity against 
our Jewish fellow-citizens and containing charges so preposterous as to be: 
unworthy of credence, be it resolved that the Federal Council of the 
Churches of Christ in America, impressed by the need at this period of our- 
national existence for unity and brotherhood, deplores all such cruel and 
unwarranted attacks upon our Jewish brethren and in a spirit of good-will 
extends to them an expression of confidence in their patriotism and their- 
good citizenship and earnestly admonishes our people to, express disapproval 
of all actions which are conducive to intolerance or tend to the destruction 
of our national unity through arousing racial division in our body politic.. 


It is a peculiar commentary upon the nature of groups and 
group leadership that the very churches thus addressed by their: 
great national leaders should have furnished so much material 
for the recruiting officers of the Ku Klux Klan. 

On January 16, 1921, a protest against anti-Semitism was. 
issued under the initiative of John Spargo, signed by one hun-. 


98 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


dred nineteen distinguished American Christians from every 
walk of life, headed by the names of President Woodrow Wil- 
son, former President William Howard Taft, and William Car- 
dinal O’Connell. I quote a few sentences from this interesting 
document : 


The loyalty and patriotism of our fellow citizens of the Jewish faith 
is equal to that of any part of our people, and requires no defense at our 
hands. . . . Anti-Semitism is almost invariably associated with lawlessness 
and with brutality and injustice. It is also invariably found closely inter- 
twined with other sinister forces, particularly those which are corrupt, 
reactionary and oppressive. We believe that it should not be left to men 
and women of Jewish faith to fight this evil, but that it is in a very special 
sense the duty of citizens who are not Jews by ancestry or faith. 


The most practical work of this kind was undertaken in De- 
cember, 1924, when a joint committee of the Federal Council 
of the Churches of Christ in America and of the Central Con- 
ference of American Rabbis met in Washington, D. C., to con- 
sider the problem of good will between Christians and Jews. 
Their statement follows in full: 


We, of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, and 
the Central Conference of American Rabbis, as represented in a joint 
session of their respective committees on good will between Jews and Chris- 
tians, realizing the necessity for a truer interpretation of Americanism and 
religion, and in order to advance both on the highest plane of good will 
and fellowship, herewith declare: 

1. The purpose of our committees is to promote mutual understanding 
and good will in the place of suspicion and ill will in the entire range of 
our inter-religious and social relations. 

2. Because of our mutual respect for the integrity of each other’s 
religion and our desire that each faith shall enjoy the fullest opportunity 
for its development and enrichment, these committees have no proselytizing 
purpose. 

3. We endorse the statement of the Federal Council of the Churches of 
Christ in America, made by its Administrative Committee in the resolution 
of September 22, 1922, declaring that the ‘‘rise of organizations whose 
members are masked, oath-bound and unknown, and whose activities have 
the effect of arousing religious prejudices and racial antipathies, is fraught 
with grave consequences to the church and to society at large.’’ To this 
statement we add our conviction that such organizations violate the funda- 
mental principles and ideals of our country and of religion, and merit 
our condemnation. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 99 


4, We realize, further, that we best reveal our fellowship by practical 
co-operation in common tasks, and it is our endeavor to formulate a program 
by which to realize the high purposes and noble endeavors of mutual 
good will and helpfulness. 


2. 


While some non-Jews were trying to break up the group ideas 
which were expressed in anti-Semitism, whether through draw- 
ing away individuals by argument, or through diverting groups 
by the prestige of great names, the Jews themselves were far 
from idle. There was a flood of books, articles, speeches, de- 
signed to show that the Jews-have had-a proud share in Amer- 
ican history.in the-past, are now patriotic citizens, are being 
wronged by calumny, and so on. Most of these were quite 
worthless for their purpose, for anti-Semitism was not caused 
by the arguments against the Jews at all; moreover, they were 
plainly apologetic and would not have impressed a prejudiced 
person in the least. But the work of several great Jewish or- 
ganizations was of a different order. 

Among a number of these organizations I select three which 
have, from their inception, made this one of their prime pur- 
poses of existence. The oldest of these is the American Jewish 
Committee, of which Mr. Louis Marshall of New York City is 
president. This organization was founded in 1906 with the 
purpose of defending Jewish rights at home and abroad; its 
immediate occasion was the Kishineff massacre in Russia, with 
the consequent strengthening of Jewish group loyalty in the 
United States as well. The annual reports of this body, pub- 
lished in the various volumes of the American Jewish Yearbook, 
reveal, besides other activities, a variety of defense methods—a 
personal protest to the head of a publishing firm which was pro- 
ducing the ‘‘Protocols’’; efforts on behalf of newly arrived im- 
migrants; the completion and publication in summary form of 
the record of American Jews in the army, navy and marine 
corps during the World War; attempts to befriend persecuted 
Jews in foreign lands. On December 1, 1920, this committee 
published an ‘‘Address to their Fellow Citizens on the Proto- 
cols, Bolshevism and the Jews,’’ which was signed also by rep- 


100 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


resentatives of nine other Jewish organizations—rabbinical con- 
ferences, unions of congregations and the like. This statement 
rehearsed the proofs against the current charges of anti-Semi- 
tism and appealed to the American public, with the evident hope 
of breaking up the group mind that was then filled with the 
image of anti-Semitism. It ends in this fashion: 

We have an abiding confidence in the spirit of justice and fairness that 
permeates the true American, and we are satisfied that our fellow-citizens 
will not permit the campaign of slander and libel that has been launched 
against us to go unreproved. . . . Let not hatred and misunderstanding 
arise where peace and harmony, unity and brotherliness, are required to 


perpetuate all that America represents, and to enable all men to know that 
within her wide boundaries there is no room for injustice and intolerance. 


The Anti-Defamation League, with its headquarters at Chi- 
cago, was founded in 1913 under the auspices of the Indepen- 
dent Order B’nai B’rith to carry on a somewhat different work.. 
Its executive secretary for almost this entire period was Mr. 
Leon L. Lewis, now Grand Secretary of the Order. Its first ac- 
tivity, which it has continued throughout, was to issue indi- 
vidual protests to such magazines, newspapers, motion picture 
producers, vaudeville managers, ete., as allowed anti-Semitic 
tendencies to creep into their productions. In many eases a 
friendly protest was enough to stop the propaganda; in some: 
extreme instances, no result whatever could be achieved, as the 
work in question was a direct expression of intolerance. Since: 
the actual anti-Semitic movement began in the United’ States, 
the Anti-Defamation League has broadened its activities, has 
published some material refuting charges against the Jew, has. 
circulated this through the country, has investigated various 
anti-Jewish organizations and so on. It has rendered great ser- 
vice in diverting from the anti-Semitic sub-group such indi- 
viduals as drifted into it more or less by accident but who were: 
not definitely aligned with it. 

Finally, the American Jewish Congress, organized in Phila- 
delphia on December 15, 1919, has passed certain resolutions. 
of mterest to the general public. Its chief work, however, was 
the appointment of delegates to represent the American Jws 
at Paris during the Peace Conference. Largely through the: 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 101 


efforts of this delegation and similar ones from the Jews of 
other countries, the rights of Jewish and other minorities in the 
newly constituted countries of eastern Europe were protected 
by treaty, and Palestine was made a British mandatory, with 
special rights of settlement for the Jews. This work, which has 
proved so important with regard to anti-Semitism abroad, has 
comparatively little direct influence on its American phase. 


3. 


This direct propaganda may have some influence, but only as 
propaganda, not as argument to refute arguments from the 
other side. The fact of difference is the primary fact on which 
anti-Semitism, like all other intolerance, is based. This can be 
transcended only by an inclusive loyalty and an inclusive pur- 
pose in which both sub-groups lose their own purposes and con- 
sequently their opposition. The most direct reaction to anti- 
Semitism appears in the intensification of Jewish loyalty. Con- 
flict makes the group mind vigorous and self-conscious, espe- 
cially in the defeated group. The power of the ‘‘lost cause”’ 
over the minds of men has been beautifully developed by Royce 
in his ‘‘Philosophy of Loyalty’’; and the cause of Jewry has 
been for two thousand years such a “‘lost cause’’ among the 
oppressors of the world. 

Thus oppression of anti-Semitism in any part of the world 
cements Jews everywhere into one body, forces the group mind 
of the Jew into unity and direction. As Dr. Drachsler points 
out: 


*Two sets of factors are of significance here: those making for identi- 
fication with the general American community and those making for segre- 
gation and isolation. The attractive features of the American environment 
have their roots in and are nourished by the equality of social and eco- 
nomic opportunity that is America’s most precious heritage. 

It is anti-Semitic propaganda that constitutes one of the segregative 
forces of the American environment. . . . To these inner strains and 
stresses, making for an increase in group self-consciousness, are added 
those outer crises arising out of the trials and tribulations of Jewries in 
other lands. The problem of civil disabilities of Jews in many European 


1 Jewish Social Service Quarterly, Nov. 1924, pp. 19-21. 


102 Anti-Semitism im the Umted States 


countries and the romantic ups and downs of Zionism have kept alive a 
steady interest among great masses of Jews in the United States. 


The group loyalty of world Jewry has shown itself in the 
United States in the form of certain agencies that have been 
particularly active during and since the World War. The pov- 
erty, persecution and devastation of the great Jewish commu- 
nities of eastern Europe occasioned the formation of the Joint 
Distribution Committee in America, in which—for the first time 
—reform, orthodox, and radical Jews sat together and labored 
in a common cause; the sixty-five million dollars they collected 
in America and disbursed abroad are less important to us than 
the group mind they developed in this common purpose. The 
Zionist movement, both as an attempt to provide a home in 
Palestine for the oppressed Jews of eastern Europe, and as a 
hope for the revival of Jewish nationality and culture in the 
Holy Land, has furnished a mode of resistance and a source of 
Jewish pride to many who felt themselves persecuted, either in 
their own persons or by proxy, in America. Such a distin- 
guished American Jew as Justice Louis D. Brandeis of the 
United States Supreme Court felt his first call to Jewish alle- 
fiance or action in middle age, when he became an active Zionist 
and the president of the Zionist Organization of America. This 
influence operated on great numbers of Jews in the United 
States during the time of anti-Semitism abroad, and on still 
more during the period of anti-Semitism here. Anti-Semitism 
is a great incentive to Jewish loyalty, even as it disrupts the 
mind of the American people into conflicting groups. 


4. 


The most important reaction to anti-Semitism is the uncon- 
scious mode of response which we call the inferiority complex. 
Certainly the Jew has such a complex. He alternates boldness 
and timidity, because he is self-conscious in the presence of the 
non-Jew and therefore uncertain of himself. Jews change their 
names from land to land, assuming the Russian ‘‘witz’’ or the 
Polish ‘‘sky’’ for the previous German ‘‘sohn’’ as a patronymic 
—for all Jewish names were originally in the Hebrew form of 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 103 


Isaac ben (son of) Abraham; but when they come to the United 
States the ‘‘witz’’ and ‘‘sky’’ are foreign and many of them 
are dropped in turn. The Hebrew Moses becomes the German 
Morris, and then the English Montague. This is partly due to 
the adoption of the standard of taste of the new environment, 
partly to the desire not to be too aggressively Jewish in exter- 
nals. As Friedman shows: 


*The Jew is the underdog of society . . . he has acquired a social 
sympathy and has become spiritually attuned to the harmonies of a juster 
social order. * Anti-Semitism is a challenge to Jewry to revivify its ideals. 
‘Danger strengthens family ties. Perhaps the pure and devoted family 
life for which the Jews have been noted may be due to the fact that they 
preserved this defensive reaction of a group under persecution. *° Persecu- 
tion has left the mark of fear on the psychology of the Jew. . . . The 
Jew retired into himself, or to the society of his kind. 


In the present state of ignorance, I cannot state how much 
of the Jewish character is hereditary and how much environ- 
mental, or how much of the latter is due to the inferiority com- 
plex and hence to anti-Semitism. Certainly there must be many 
traits of this origin. Thomas Babington Macaulay made this 
discovery in 1833, when he argued in the House of Commons 
in favor of removing civil disabilities from the Jews of Eng- 
land. 


. . If all the red-haired people in Europe had, during centuries, been 
outraged and oppressed, banished from this place, driven from that . 
if, when manners became milder, they had still been subject to debasing 
restrictions and exposed to vulgar insults . . . what would be the patriot- 
ism of gentlemen with red hair? 


Ludwig Lewisohn finds exactly such an artificial case in the 
German-Americans during the World War: 


°I (the German) know exactly now why you (the Jew) and your people 
are accused of bad manners. How can one’s manners be good when all 
agreement and social certainties are lacking? Whatever one does will be 
considered an excess. . . . So I am beginning to understand the voluntary 
and yet involuntary segregation of Jewry. 


2Friedman: Survival or Extinction, p. 112. *p.121. ‘4p. 1381. 5p. 184. 
6 The Nation, Feb. 20, 1924. 


104 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


To which the Jew retorts: 

The worst of it is that we are all super-sensitive because we are neuras- 
thenic. . . . There is scarcely a Jewish family in which there isn’t either 
madness or genius. Commonly both. 


Professor Miller generalizes this into a theory of ‘‘ oppression 
psychosis,’’ mentioned above: 


7A technique is developed by the group and the individuals in it to meet 
the situation and retain the self-esteem necessary to life . . . the Jewish 
capacity to trade was developed under a necessity for survival in which 
trade offered the only possibility. * The patriotism of an oppressed people 
is full of pathological elements. The symptoms vary slightly, but there is 
always hypersensitiveness and self-consciousness. The classic example is 
the Jew, and the Jewish problem wherever it exists can never be solved 
until most of the Jewish characteristics are diagnosed as the pathological 
result of the experience to which they have been subjected. . . . A very 
large portion of the peoples of the world are suffering from present or 
past experiences of oppression and therefore cannot be expected to act as 
normal groups. °® The conspicuousness of the Jew is in large part due to his 
psychopathic adjustment to his environment. It is further due to the 
necessary technique for survival. *° The peculiarity of the Jew is that be- 
cause he has been made self-conscious by his experience, he has acquired a 
solidarity which has been kept vivid through adherence to the Law. 


Besides the pathology of the case, Miller here indicates two 
modes of adjustment, the success motive and the religious mo- 
tive. The former can be seen clearly in the Jewish students, 
who are largely excluded from social and athletic leadership in 
the colleges, and whose response is to excel wherever possible 
in scholarship. It appears in the medieval Jew who was placed 
outside the feudal system and consequently had no feudal loy- 
alties, but established the first international financial connec- 
tions; or in the Jew of some of the modern hyper-nationalistic 
countries of Europe, who is excluded from public life and finds 
his outlet in Zionism. Finally, and most important of all his- 
torically, the Jew has found his compensation in his religion. 
He was the Chosen People, he had the sacred Torah, he kept the 
festivals, obeyed the commandments of God; in the home and 
the synagog he was priest and king, whatever might be his 


7 Miller: Races, Nations and Classes, Chapter II, p. 36. ®%p. 182. *%p. 97, 
10 
Deevps 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 105 


beatings or his cringings without. Conversely, the growing in- 
difference to Judaism today is both an adaptation to the new 
modes of thought the world over, and a relaxing of intensity 
of Jewish loyalty in the countries where the penalties for that 
loyalty are themselves relaxed. 

The religious interpretation of this status is very ancient. 
The Bible speaks of the Jews as a ‘‘peculiar people’’; ‘‘a king- 
dom of priests and a holy nation.’’ And the Talmud says: 


God selected as His sacrifices not the pursuer but the pursued; not the 
lion but the bullock, not the wolf but the lamb, not the eagle but the dove. 
In the same way Israel, the pursued of all the heathen, the weakest of the 
nations of the world, is the Chosen People, the fitting sacrifice of the Lord. 


The famous fifty-second chapter of Isaiah with its marvelous 
conception of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, is again a pic- 
ture of the Jewish people, persecuted and oppressed, but finding 
its purpose and its compensation in its religious message, which 
in the Messianic age was to convince and to overawe the world. 

Perhaps I can best summarize this view in the words of Ana- 
tole Leroy-Beaulieu, whose ‘‘Israel among the Nations’’ some 
thirty years ago marked a new treatment of the Jewish ques- 
tion by a Christian writer. This book contains a chapter on 
the Psychology of the Jew, in which he develops the idea of 
the influence of the milieu on the Jewish character: 


“The Jew has kept his energy, but he has kept it within him, out of 
sight. His tenacity is now concealed by artfulness and masked beneath 
humility. . . . Deprived of the weapons of the strong, he resorted to the 
devices of the weak, to cunning, trickery and deceit. . . . Unable to com- 
mand respect for his frail personality, the Jew took refuge in a collective 
pride; he was proud of his people, his religion, and his God. Never has he 
lost faith in the superiority of Israel. . . . This explains why for cen- 
turies they were able to bear such a burden of contempt without breaking 
down beneath its weight. The mainspring of Israel’s inner life was not 
broken; it remained intact, ready to be set in motion again on the day of 
deliverance. Bowed as he was, the Jew was always ready for the time of 
upraising. 


1 Beaulieu: Israel among the Nations. 


106 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


dD. 


The various theories and groupings of Jewry today may be 
regarded from the viewpoint of responses to the total environ- 
ment, of which anti-Semitism is one of the important factors. 
On this basis neither Zionism nor reform Judaism ean be re- 
garded directly as a reply to anti-Semitism, but both are this 
among other things, for both are modes of response to the en- 
vironment, with its Jewish and its non-Jewish factors. Two 
such responses are religious—the orthodox and the reform; two 
are racial and national—the assimilationist and the Zionist. 
From another standpoint, two are modes of adjustment to the 
environment—assimilation and reform; two are modes of re- 
sistance to the environment—Zionism and orthodoxy. Or, more 
precisely, assimilation is a racial adjustment to the non-Jewish 
environment; reform Judaism a religious adjustment; Zionism 
is a racial and national resistance to the environment; and or- 
thodoxy a religious resistance. Obviously, the four are not un- 
related, but many individuals adopt more than one of them as 
guides in various fields of thought and behavior. 

Assimilation of the Jew to his environment, which ieee 
abandonment of the group life, is an individual, not a group 
response. It attracts individuals in considerable numbers from 
the extreme right and left wings of American Jewry, from the 
very wealthy who may adopt Christianity for social distinction, 
and from the proletarians who adopt an international economic 
and political theory. It cannot be a group response because if 
great masses of Jews were to join any other church, or any other 
national or social grouping, they would do it as Jews still—we 
would then have churches of Hebrew Christians, or a Jewish 
wing for the Socialist party (as in Russia), but not the absorp- 
tion in the environment which the assimilationist considers the 
solution of the Jewish problem. One point is true in the assimi- 
lationist theory—if there were no Jewish group, there would be 
no anti-Semitism. It is equally true that if there were no groups 
of human beings, there would be no intolerance. But such a 
condition is impossible. Men is a social being, and the tra- 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 107 


dition, the ideals, and the life of his own group hold him too 
firmly to be escaped except by the smallest minority. 

12 Assimilation may be social or biological in character, and 
the radical adoption of it would involve both phases. Inter- 
marriage, the biological side of assimilation, is actually going 
on now, but to a much smaller extent among the Jews than 
among any other immigrant group in America. Drachsler 
worked out the proportion of intermarriages among 100,000 
marriages in New York City of all races, and found that ap- 
proximately 14 per cent. of these were intermarriages. Among 
all white groups, however, the Jews presented the “smallest pro- 
portion of intermarriages, 1.17 per cent., ranging from less than 
half of 1 per cent. among Rumanian Jews, to 5 per cent. among 
German Jews, and 6.5 per cent. among French Jews. The age- 
old tradition against marriage outside of the group, together 
with the anti-Semitic spirit without, have conspired to prevent 
this type of assimilation even now. And while the second genera- 
tion of Jews in America shows far more intermarriages than 
the first, the proportion is still extremely low—.64 per cent. for 
the first generation, and 4.5 per cent. for the second. And for 
a more assimilated section of Jewry, such as the German Jews, 
the difference between first and second generations is much less 
marked. 

The directly opposite theory to assimilation is Zionism, the 
attempt to revive Jewish group life in the ancient homeland of 
the Jew, to restore the Hebrew tongue, erect a Jewish educa- 
tional system, Jewish culture, and Jewish agriculture and in- 
dustry as well. The connection of this movement with anti- 
Semitism is evident from its origin in the mind of Theodore 
Herzl, a Viennese correspondent in Paris, directly after he had 
observed the Dreyfus case, and his whole Weltanshauung was 
thereby transformed. Zionism is the same answer to the prob- 
lems of internationalism and civilization that we see in all the 
new nationalities of Europe, in Ireland, Czecho-Slovakia and 
Poland. It has achieved a measure of success that is really as- 
tonishing in view of the slight resources and organization be- 


122 Democracy and Assimilation, Chapter IV. 


108 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


hind it. At the same time, it makes no pretension toward fur- 
nishing an eventual home for all the Jewish people, especially 
not for those of the United States and other lands of freedom. 
Zionism aims to save the persecuted Jews by finding for many 
of them a shelter; it aims, moreover, to solve the double prob- 
lem of anti-Semitism and the inferiority complex by giving the 
Jewry of the world a source of pride in the form of a national 
home. To many thinkers this seems the only answer under pres- 
ent conditions. 


Friedman’s whole thesis is that Zionism is the logical and 
final solution. 


** The conflict between the Jew and his environment must be eliminated. 
By what means may this aim be reached? LHither the incongruous elements 
must be removed or else they must be made compatible. ™“ Only in their 
historic land where the Jews will be in the majority, where they can without 
fear of peculiarity assert their culture, is a Jewish mode of life possible. 
** Zionism at bottom is an attempt to preserve the remnant of Israel, that 
will make of Palestine its home. It alone promises to save the Jewish 
people, when the processes of assimilation, now at work in Western Europe 
and in the United States, shall extend to a liberalized Eastern Europe. 
* The Jew today is a bundle of conflicts. Not only does he in the present 
dispersed state suffer from the external, objective and social anti-Semitism, 
but also from an internal, subjective and psychological slavery. The Zion- 
ist insists on the maintenance of Jewish distinctiveness, of Jewish per- 
onality. 


Orthodoxy in Judaism is the attempt to maintain the Jewish 
group by means of the religious and customary behavior which 
has operated successfully for that end since the destruction of 
the Jewish commonwealth in 70 A.D. It is conservative; it 
finds its chief values, not in the national, but in the religious 
life; and it endeavors to hold its group intact by a traditional 
ritual which possesses a profound emotional appeal and _estab- 
lishes certain habits of life. It is the appeal to loyalty and to 
group stability, and parallels similar conservative movements in 
many Christian denominations, though with the stronger urge 
of a longer and more bitter history of persecution. 


19 Friedman: Survival or Extinction, p. 140. %*p. 106. ™p. 166. yp. 190. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 109 


Finally, there is a theory of group adaptation, best developed 
institutionally by the reform and conservative synagogs, but 
also in many non-religious organizations—social clubs, Young 
Men’s Hebrew Associations (the very name an imitation), labor 
unions, and the like. Not that these various parties are identi- 
eal; as a matter of fact, they have practically nothing in com- 
mon except the incorporation in their philosophies of the two 
elements—Jewish tradition and modern adaptation; but the con- 
servative and reform statements—of adaptation, of tradition, and 
of the relation between the two—present profound differences 
both in theory and in practical details of application. This ad- 
justment is not as yet entirely successful, but has developed a 
number of useful responses, by which Jews are managing to 
preserve their group identity and at the same time to enter as 
constituent members into the American group mind. It is still 
in a transition period, but the synthesis is being worked out 
clearly enough for our purposes. In the synagog it involves 
the reading of part of the prayers in English, as well as He- 
brew, the beautification of the service by modern music, both 
vocal and instrumental, the incorporation of a sermon in En- 
glish, a modern system of religious education, and a development 
of the social life of the young people by clubs, classes and recre- 
ational means. Without the synagog, it involves a type of 
‘*Modernism,’’ intellectual and moral. Even in the group which 
endeavors to be most orthodox, it is finding its way in the form 
of social surveys, modern methods in Hebrew education, and 
some sort of working compromise with the community custom of 
Sunday observance, the English language and the eating of 
non-kosher food. The nature of this adjustment is clear from 
the fact that every separate item has a different solution. The 
great majority of Jews work on the traditional Sabbath, due to 
the combined social and economic pressure; they universally are 
adopting English as their daily speech, but the majority of them 
have not yet admitted English into the ritual of the synagog; 
all those who really care to do so maintain the Jewish dietary 
laws in their own homes, though very few (comparatively) go 
so far as to refuse to enter a restaurant where the dishes are 
washed with soap, or to refuse to drink wine made by gentiles 


11000 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


of which a libation might have been made to idols. At the same 
time, the Hebrew education, so long an integral part of Jewish 
life, has been completely revolutionized from the unsystematic 
private or charity instruction of Russia to the large, well or- 
ganized schools for daily Hebrew instruction at the close of the 
public school day, whose method is largely copied from that 
of the American public school *’. 

We are witnessing before our eyes a group adjustment on a 
large scale to modern thought, to American customs, to the non- 
Jewish group. Some of this adjustment is systematic, based on 
a theory of Jewish life as a distinct religion among Americans 
of other religions. Some of it is economic and social, either 
without theory or directly against the orthodox theory of the 
adjusters themselves. At the same time, we are witnessing or- 
thodoxy fighting for group solidarity; Zionism establishing a 
Jewish group in a distant land; the assimilationists who escape 
as individuals from the burden and the odium of being Jews. 
Each theory is today being tried out in practice, and the results 
of each will in time be demonstrated. At the same time, each 
theory of Jewish life implies a corresponding conception of 
America and of human groups as a whole. 


17 See Gamoran: Changing Conceptions in Jewish Education. 


CHAPTER IX. 


THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN MIND 
ut 


The ideal of most social thinkers has been that of uniformity, 
absence of parties and swallowing of groups in a common loy- 
alty. 

Then none was for a party; 
Then all were for the state; 
Then the great man helped the poor, 
And the poor man loved the great; 
Then lands were fairly portioned; 
Then spoils were fairly sold; 
The Romans were like brothers 
In the brave days of old. 


Uniformity and unity within, hostility and spoils from with- 
out—this is the old ideal of the happy society, founded on the 
patriotism of the little Greek cities in their petty isolation. 

But now this point of view of the state, appropriate in its 
origin, is applied uncritically to a great modern nation, with 
a hundred cities larger than any one of ancient Greece, with its 
inhabitants drawn from the ends of the earth—such a nation 
shall also present a uniformity of blood, speech and loyalty. 
What is the method by which such an end can be achieved? 
What is the theory by which such an end can be justified ? 

Dr. I. Berkson in his ‘‘Theories of Americanization’’ has de- 
veloped in detail four types of theory for the relation of the 
sub-groups, especially the immigrant sub-groups, to the Amer- 
ican nation. Of these the first two imply uniformity, ‘‘ Ameri- 
ecanization’’ by imposing the social and cultural standards of 
the Anglo-Saxon group on the newer arrivals; the ‘‘ Melting- 
Pot’’ by which uniformity is to be achieved through a general 
admixture and intermingling, racial or social. The viewpoint 
of Americanization has been mentioned previously in this study 
—the view that the United States ought to be a homogeneous 


1 Macaulay: Lays of Ancient Rome. 


111 


112 Anti-Semitism in the Unted States 


people, and that the proper standard of homogeneity is that of 
the white, Protestant, gentile group, of Anglo-Saxon origin. 
The newer arrivals are expected to forget their native languages 
and habits, to throw off their former loyalties, to copy the stand- 
ards of life which they see already established in this country. 
The new loyalty is conceived as antagonistic to the old; the de- 
mands of democracy that the new citizen also shall express him- 
self are quite disregarded. The rapidity of the process of in- 
termarriage among many immigrant groups, and the still greater 
speed of social adaptation and assimilation are evidences that 
this theory has something in its favor. The awakening group 
loyalties which its repressive methods arouse show definitely that 
it has not the final word. As Lewis 8. Gannet put it: 


?We are forcing the Jew to choose between assimilation with complete 
loss of group identity, and the establishment of entirely independent cul- 
tural institutions—and we are shoving him more and more toward the 
latter choice. . . . It is not so much anti-Semitism, Christian theology, or 
Jewish traits that stand in the way as the smug Anglo-Saxon tradition of 
exclusiveness and self-sufficiency. 


A variation of this, which posits uniformity, but not the uni- 
formity of one group imposed on all the rest, is the Melting- 
Pot theory. The term was fathered by Israel Zangwill, who 
made the young Jewish immigrant exclaim: 


* America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races 
of Europe are melting and reforming!—Here you stand, good folks, think 
I, when I see you at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with 
your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. 
But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God 
you come to—these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and your 
vendettas! German and Frenchman, Irishman and English, Jews and Rus- 
sians, into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American! 


Something of the same view seems to be voiced by John J. 
Smertenko : 


* Unless it be the Indian, there is no American type; the future American 
will be the result of a synthesis of all the people that have poured their 
life-blood into the veins of our nation. Hence it is impossible for the Jew 
—and the same principles apply to Irishman, German, Italian, and the 


2The Nation, March 21, 1923. 
*Zangwill: The Melting Pot, Act I. 
4The Nation, April 11, 1923. 


Anti-Semitism in the United States 113 


others—to become a hundred per cent. American until America is at least 
three per cent. Jewish. 


The Melting Pot theory marks an advance over the Ameri- 
canization theory in its treatment of the immigrant, not in its 
conception of the United States. Uniformity, physical or social 
or both, is taken as the sine qua non of group unity, like-mind- 
edness as its minimum. But many ethnic groups, religious 
groups and others, wish to maintain their identity in their new 
home. Democracy would allow them to do so. The group theory 
of American life—which I have already elaborated historically 
and in the present, would not merely allow this, but take it as 
the only normal way in which an over-group of a hundred mil- 
lion people can ever hope to attain the unity of a group mind. 


2. 


The first form of such a theory is called by Dr. Berkson the 
“Federation of Nationalities.’’ It is modelled after the Federal 
government, which is a union of self-governing states. In the 
same way, as geographical units grow steadily less important 
and functional units more important in our national life, the 
same conception of federation was applied to these. The Soviet 
government has taken national control as a function of a fed- 
eration of economic interests; the federation of nationalities 
view takes it as a federation of ethnic and religious groups. Our 
greater cities are now beginning to establish this sort of an ap- 
pearance. They have Italian quarters, Jewish quarters, Negro 
quarters, even an American quarter, restricted to families whose 
acceptability can be approved and vouched for. The advocate 
of this theory holds that races are unchangeable—‘‘a man can- 
not change his grandfather,’’ they say—the best that they can 
do is to live in amity within the same general national boun- 
daries. Now, it is true that groupings based on heredity and 
on interest are growing increasingly important, as compared 
with the geographical groupings which once meant so much. 
Only in the old families, whose associations with a particular 
state have persisted for generations, is much state sentiment left 
among us. On the other hand, the Catholic, the Bohemian, the 


114 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


German, the Jew—every national and religious group has en- 
during loyalties. And the new economic groupings, labor, capi- 
tal, the commercial class, the trade association, are developing 
their own group minds more rapidly than we can easily note. 

The danger of this theory, however, is as obvious as its par- 
tial justification. It would make for the stability of what is 
actually fluid. All groups take more than they give when they 
enter a great mass of other groups, such as the United States. 
Immigrant communities in the United States are changing con- 
stantly, due to imitation—the Federation theory would estab- 
lish them in the fixity of conflict and opposition. It would result, 
on the one hand, in permanent immigrant groups, with lit- 
tle participation in the general American group mind; on the 
other, in permanent groups of protest, such as the Ku Klux 
Klan. Carried to its logical extreme, it would give us the situ- 
ation of the Levant, where a half dozen different races and reli- 
gions, represented in the same village, preserve their isolation 
and their enmity for a thousand years. 


3. 


Both the old Americans, who insist on American unity, and 
the newer immigrants, who see and love their own group iden- 
tity, have taken hold of real elements in the total situation, but 
neither has envisaged the social process as a whole. It is true 
that ethnic and religious groups are distinct in America, both 
racially and socially; on the whole, the Jew refuses to inter- 
marry with the gentile, the white with the Negro, a prohibition 
that in the Southern states is reenforced by law. Similarly, the 
Irishman preserves his loyalty and his interest in the struggle — 
for Irish liberty ; the Italian and Greek reservists return to their 
native lands when ealled for military duty; the Jew raises huge 
sums for the relief of his fellow-Jews across the seas. But at 
the same time, all these groups were ready: to unite in a com- 
mon purpose when the United States was at war. Every im- 
migrant group, aS every native group, daily sacrifices its own 
purpose in a crucial problem for the greater welfare of the 
United States. The double process, which we have traced in 


Anti-Semitism in the United States aha Be 


the formulation of the Constitution of the United States and in 
subsequent history, is constantly going on—the entrance of new 
groups into the United States, and their incorporation into the 
American group. This is what Dr. Berkson calls the ‘‘commu- 
nity’’ theory, Professor Miller, ‘‘proportional loyalty,’’ and 
many other thinkers by other terms, a point of view toward 
which social theory and political thought is constantly tending; 
one which we may call, in the terms employed in this study, the 
integration of sub-groups into the American group mind by the 
sacrifice of their own purpose for that of the United States as 
a whole. 

This theory recognizes the necessary and proper existence of 
the sub-groups, whether family, religious, racial or ethnic units. 
Human beings live naturally in comparatively small units, which 
ean be easily recognized and whose loyalty is habitual (some 
would even claim, instinctive). These groups then join with 
others into larger units of synthesis, by accepting the common 
purpose of the whole in place of the conflicting purposes of 
each. Just as the individual becomes a loyal member of a family, 
the family of a Protestant church or a Jewish people, so that 
church or ethnic unit becomes, in turn, a unit in the larger whole 
of the American people. Group intolerance is thus sacrificed to 
America in increasing proportion and scope; while group indi- 
viduality preserves the democratic ideal by which a man is an 
end in himself. The personal satisfactions and welfare of the 
immigrants themselves cannot be advanced by compelling them 
to give up everything they hold dear—instead, the attempt will 
prove subversive of the hoped-for unity by the usual result of 
group resistance. But all these values can be retained in a 
higher synthesis, a gradation of loyalties, an integration of minds 
in a true group mind. 

The traditional Hebrew phrases for the Jewish people are Am 
Israel, the People of Israel, and Keneseth Israel, the Congrega- 
tion of Israel—grasping thus both the racial and spiritual ele- 
ments in one conception. To quote Berkson: 


* This conception which identifies the Jewish people with its cultural and 
spiritual aspirations comes very close to the view that nationality is essen- 


116 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


tially a psychological force. *The ‘‘Community’’ theory would make the 
history of the ethnic group, its esthetic, cultural and religious inheritance, 
its national self-consciousness the basic factor. *The ‘‘Community’’ 
theory endeavors to meet all the justifiable considerations presented in each 
of the other proposals. It seeks especially to avoid such a scheme of ad- 
justment as would tend to force the individual to accept one solution as 
against another. It leaves all the forces working; they are to decide what 
the future is to be. 


Professor Dewey put the matter similarly: 


’The way to deal with hyphenism is to welcome it, but to welcome it 
with the sense of extracting from each people its special good, so that it 
shall surrender into a common fund of wisdom and experience what it 
especially has to contribute. All of these surrenders and contributions 
taken together create the national spirit of America. The dangerous thing 
is for each factor to isolate itself, to try to live off its past, and then to 
attempt to impose itself upon other elements, or at least, to keep itself 
intact and thus refuse to accept what other cultures have to offer, so as 
thereby to be transmuted into authentic Americanism. 


Dr. Drachsler represents the same point of view: 


*To hope for a rich, composite civilization in America through biological 
fusion merely is to chase a will-o’-the-wisp. Nothing short of conscious 
social control of the transmission of the cultural heritage will achieve the 
result. *° The function of the cultural groups would be to foster through 
voluntary cultural community organization their cultural uniqueness, while 
the function of the State would embrace the harmonization of these cul- 
tural differences, the unification of distinctive contributions into a rich and 
variegated whole. “America with her unique experience of multiform 
contacts of races and peoples is in a position to invest the concept of 
democracy with a broader and richer meaning than any nation has done 
thus far. She can, if she will, develop the principle of tolerance as no 
people has yet dared to do. She can, if she will, encourage the search for 
the unique and the distinctive in social life, side by side with a strong 
emphasis on the basic human interests. 


But, many will say, does this theory erect conflicting loyalties? 
Can they be reconciled? The answer to this is in terms of pro- 
portional loyalties. I quote Professor Miller’s summary: 


% The real problem of society is the living together of individuals and 
groups in such a way that both the individual and the group can attain 


® Berkson: Theories of Americanization, p. 101. *p. 98. 7p. 117. 
® Dewey: Addresses and Proceedings of the Nat. Ed. Assn. Vol. LIV, p. 185. 
®Drachsler: Democracy and Assimilation, p. 236. %p. 188. 4p. 222. 


| Anti-Semitism im the United States i Wg 


the highest degree of self-realization. *One of the greatest obstacles to: 
truth and progress is the preaching of one hundred per cent. Americanism. 
. . Reality demands that we begin to advocate ten to twenty-five per cent.. 
patriotism. This proportion will account for the peculiarly provincial 
values that our particular fatherland has contributed to our development. 
. The seventy-five to ninety per cent. of loyalty that is left belongs to- 
values in our lives that are international rather than national. 


Among these international values he finds the religious, eco- 
nomie and cultural ones, all of which transcend the nation, either 
by being wider or narrower, belonging to a sub-group or to hu- 
manity. 


4. 


This integration of groups need not stop at the nation as at 
present constituted, as is hinted in the last citation. The 
nation is itself an integration of groups, and can enter into. 
other integrations, which include it or which cross it with dif- 
ferent lines of interest and of grouping. In the words of U. G.. 
Weatherly : 


“Loyalty to a particular unit with a well defined function in no way 
collides with allegiance to other bodies with quite other outlooks. . 
Men may still remain good national patriots while loyally accepting the 
controls exercised by world standards in science, art or music. * Both race: 
and nation must be preserved because they have certain permanent and 
necessary functions, and because they are the natural centers of that 
loyalty which can never be swallowed up in world-loyalty, since human 
nature cannot live wholly in universals. . . . Between these two sets of 
loyalties there is a clear distinction; the one is local and particularistic, the- 
other is human. A well-rounded social organization, whether within the 
single group or between groups, will give practical scope to each. . 
In a practical way men must recognize that since they have multiple inter- 
ests, they may have multiple allegiances. 


To return to Miller for another phrase: 


7% The nation is a growth from innumerable simpler social forms, and’ 
the growth to internationalism is relatively little more complex than the 
growth of nationalism. * The old patriotism means stultification; an adap-- 


12 Miller: Races, Nations and Classes, p. 169. 1p. 186. 
%* Racial Pessimism, in Pub. Amer. Sociol. Soc. Vol. XVIII, p. 18. ™“p. 14. 
16 Miller, p. 181. ™p. 191. 


118 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


tation of loyalty to meet actual present conditions means enlargement of 
character and the possibility of a new world. 


There is no beginning and no end to the growth and the or- 
ganization of the mind. Beginning with the individual and the 
family, we may analyze the elements which enter into these 
elementary mental units, or we may observe the mounting syn- 
thesis to the city, state and nation; or, following other lines 
of interest and of affiliation, to the movements of world culture, 
religion and economic organization, in their world-wide bearing. 
The nation is formed by a synthesis of its sub-groups; and the 
nation, in turn, enters into a wider synthesis to form the nas- 
cent but still growing conception of mankind. The mind of 
the many groups of Americans yield up their purposes, when 
called upon, for the greater unity—greater not only in size, but 
in richness, variety and tradition—that constitutes the mind 
of America. The future will mark the growing unity in diver- 
sity of the American group mind; the mounting beauty of its 
many-colored canvas, the increasing harmony of its many- 
throated symphony. At the same time, America will become 
more and more a part of a still greater synthesis, the group 
mind that will transcend the selfish purpose of the nation in 
such common purposes as the struggle against the adverse forces 
of nature; the organization of men for welfare and for culture; 
the prevention of that ancient group intolerance, which means 
the destruction of many small groups and the standardization 
and impoverishment of many great ones. The fulfillment of 
the prophet’s vision will be at hand when groups of men will 
not strive to destroy each other but to fulfill each other, when 
the sub-group will not undermine but serve the greater unity, 
when the ultimate vision of every struggling group of men, be 
it small or great, will be to serve the purpose of the whole, to 
enter into the mind of humanity, the ideal of God. 


Anti-Semitism im the United States 119 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 
FRANZ Boaz, The Mind of Primitive Man. 
PauL BartH, Die Philosphie der Geschichte als Soziologie. 
I. BERKSON, Theories of Americanization. 
JAMES Mark BaALDwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations. 
Sir Martin Conway, The Crowd in Peace and War. 
Sanrorp H. Coss, The Rise of Religious Liberty in America. 
Susan L. Davis, Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan. 
WILLIAM DuRANT, Philosophy and the Social Problem. 
JULIUS DRACHSLER, Democracy and Assimilation. 
JOHN Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy. 
WiLuiAM Ray DENNES, Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology. 
CuarLes A. ELLwoop, Sociology in Its Psychological Aspects. 
M. FISHBERG, The Jews, a Study in Race and Environment. 
C. R. FisuH, Development of American Nationality. 
EvisHA M. FRIEDMAN, Survival or Extinction. 
JEAN FinotT, Race Prejudice. 
Morris GINSBERG, The Psychology of Society. 
GUMPLOWITZ, Der Rassenkampf. 
E. B. GREENE, Foundations of American Nationality. 
PAUL GOODMAN, The Synagog and the Church. 
Burton J. HENprRICcK, The Jews in America. 
THE INTERNATIONAL JEW, 4 vol. 
JOSEPH JACOBS, Contributions of the Jew to Civilization. 
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B. LAZzARE, Anti-Semitism. 
WALTER LIPPMAN, Public Opinion. 
LE Bon, Le Foule. 
E. C. LINDEMAN, Social Discovery. 
JOHN M. Mecxkuin, The Ku Klux Klan. 
EvrErett D. Martin, The Behavior of Crowds. 
HERBERT A. MILLER, Races, Nations and Classes. 
WILLIAM MaAcDouaGa.u, Introduction to Social Psychology. 
WiLtu1aAM MacDoueauu, The Group Mind. 
CHARLES PLATT, Psychology of Social Life. 
THE PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION. 
Max Raisin, History of the Jews in Modern Times. 
MELVIN G. Riee, 2d, Theories of the Obligation of Citizen to State. 
J. H. Ropinson, The Mind in the Making. 
Epwarp A. Ross, Social Control. 
JosiAH Roycez, Philosophy of Loyalty. 
THE REFERENCE SHELF: Ku Klux Klan. 
THE REFERENCE SHELF: Restriction of Immigration. 
JOHN SparGo, The Jew and American Ideals. 


120 Anti-Semitism in the United States 


NATHANIEL S. SHAILER, The Neighbor. 

MaAvrRiIcE SAMUEL, You Gentiles. 

Oscar STRAUS, The American Spirit. 

Puitie Scuarr, Church and State in the United States. 

EpGar A. SINGER, JR., Mind as Behavior. 

Ep@ar A. SINGER, JR., Modern Thinkers and Present Problems. 

GABRIEL TARDE, Les lois de 1’imitation. 

W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. 

FRANK TANNENBAUM, Darker Phases of the South. 

J. M. W1LuiAMS, Principles of Social Psychology. 

PETER WIERNICK, History of the Jews in America. 

Lucien Wotr, The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs. 

IsRAEL ZANGWILL, The Voice of Jerusalem. 

American Journal of Sociology, May 1924. - 
Allport: Group Fallacy in Relation to Social Science. 
Kantor: Institutional Foundation of a Scientific Social Psychology. 

American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1925. 

Bohn: The Ku Klux Klan Interpreted. 

American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1911. 
George E. Vincent: The Rivalry of Groups. 

B’nai B’rith Magazine, Oct., Nov. 1924. 

J. Speransky: My Adventures with Radicals. 

B’nai B’rith Magazine, 1922 and ’23. 

A series on the Ku Klux Klan, with statements by its Grand Wizard. 

Hearst’s International Magazine, 1922 and ’23. 

A series on anti-Semitism; another on the Ku Klux Klan. 

Jewish Social Service Quarterly, Nov. 1924. 

Drachsler* Jewish Communal Life in the United States. 

The Menorah Journal, Nov. 1924. 

Erwin Edman: Race and Culture. Frequent articles on similar topics. 

The Nation, 1923 and ’24. 

A series of 10 articles on anti-Semitism. 

Publications of the American Sociological Society, Vol XVIII. 

U. G. Weatherly: Racial Pessimism. 
Harry F. Ward: Repression of Civil Liberties. 
John A. Ryan: Intolerance: Causes and Lessons. 


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